An all out character driven novel with a slow building plot with quite an ending. My kind of book! and should make a great book discussion.

Rindell fleshes out her character(s) quite well, with excellent narration, reliable or not, by Rose, the original typist. Rose Baker, clicks away her days in a New York police department back in the days of prohibition and the speakeasies. Rose is quite the formal young woman and takes her job quite seriously, making few mistakes and not tolerating any from others. She's a bit stodgy to say the least and at first I liked her but after a bit, I thought, oh drat, I could never live up to her expectations and would I want too. Still all seems to be going well when enters the other typist, Odalie. Odalie seems to be all Rose is not, flamboyant, a bit crass, and not the greatest of typists. You guessed it; Rose becomes infatuated with Odalie and soon they are the best of friends. You definitely want to see how this relationship pans out.

An excellent psychological study of morals and more; The Other Typist is spooled out like the ribbon of a typewriter to its very end. Suddenly there is no more. Find someone who has read it to compare notes. I know I will!

This was a character driven slow unwrapping of a story with a WTH? ending. We follow the story a two women characters whose lives become entwined so much so that by the last sentence you wondering if you knew what you thought you knew. This is different and that is what made it enjoyable.

I am not quite sure why but I seem to have read a few novels lately that have a naive young woman and another manipulative one. This one is very well written, a psychological tour de force, with an unreliable narrator and different revelations that keep you guessing. It is hard to tell for much of the book, how much of the truth is being told. Odalie is a prime piece of work, but although some things are not as they appear, some are and it is very hard to tell which is which and what is what. So if you like psychologically twist novels, this is one which begs the question, is evil contagious?