I was of two minds on this novel. I enjoyed the main character, Niamh, who has just lost her mother and who has moved into her mother’s remote cottage in the English countryside. She has a cat, Brian, but mostly she is (not) dealing with her grief by sofa surfing and playing video games. She is startled out of her “grief journey” (as her stepmother refers to it) by the appearance of the main character in her author mother’s books. Her mother had written thrillers featuring someone I can only describe as a female Jack Reacher, differing in gender and in that she has a fixed place of abode.
The appearance of this character, Leah, is more than startling, obviously. Is she a ghost? Is she an apparition? Is she a figment of Niamh’s tortured psyche? Whatever Leah is, she manages to pull Niamh off the sofa. Her mother’s death had occurred when she took a fall from a ladder while fixing the gutter. While this seemed unlike her mother, Niamh has accepted her death as an accident, and it’s Leah who suggests it might in fact be a murder.
She can’t find the ladder her mother fell off and she can’t find her mother’s phone and so with Leah’s push, she decides to investigate. She begins, naturally, with her neighbors – the next door former cop, devoted to his garden to an obsessive degree; the titled and reclusive elderly lady and her niece; and someone she refers to as “The Wanker,” a wealthy young guy who uses his restored farmhouse on the weekends, leaving his obscenely large vehicle in everyone’s way.
As she gets to know the neighbors to a degree, she also begins to look inside her mother’s bookish world – and ends up chasing leads to a book conference and to a son of another mysteriously dead thriller writer. What was good about this book was the character of Niamh and, in fact, her grief journey, though she refuses to refer to it in those terms. Her grief is real, raw, and believable.
The other strong point, though it was weird, was the character of Leah, who pushes Niamh and gets her through some tough spots with a click of her virtual zippo lighter. When Niamh is in danger of breaking down and letting loose the always threatening floods of tears, a click of Leah’s lighter rights her and she’s able to push on (mostly). This messy character study was appealing. Niamh was even annoyingly human in her ceaseless yet completely understandable grief for her mother.
What wasn’t as strong was the actual plot, which is meander-y and often gets off track. As someone closer to Niamh’s mother’s age I was somewhat fascinated, somewhat charmed, and somewhat exasperated by Niamh’s millennial behavior. She’s never heard of Columbo or V.I. Warshawski – but she has heard of Jack Reacher. Made me feel old, though also wishing I could reach through the pages and share a bit of experience with her.
I will say the ending twist was quite well done and quite unexpected, and I applauded Niamh’s refusal to be a lame damsel in distress. Say what you will about millennials, they are pretty fierce, as they must be to deal with the world of the moment. So a big hand for the characters, a hand for the mind bendy use of Leah as a character, and a bit of a miss for the wobbly plot. — Robin Agnew