{"id":1780,"date":"2015-09-28T11:09:52","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T18:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1780"},"modified":"2015-09-28T11:09:52","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T18:09:52","slug":"sophie-hannah-woman-with-a-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/sophie-hannah-woman-with-a-secret\/","title":{"rendered":"Sophie Hannah: Woman with a Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"WomanWithASecret\"<\/a>As with Tana French, I have a love\/hate relationship with Sophie Hannah, an extremely talented writer who nevertheless (like Tana French) tends to dilly-dally a bit in the middle of her books. Hannah\u2019s books are a series but the series characters are merely a very loose binder for the truly spectacular set-ups Hannah comes up with. She\u2019s one of the best in the biz when it comes to setting up a story, and I imagine that\u2019s why she was chosen to continue writing Christie\u2019s Poirot books.<\/p>\n

Her series characters, Charlie and Simon, are married detectives. Simon has the reputation of brilliance; he and Charlie are excellent at bouncing ideas off one another. Charlie\u2019s sister is having a long-term affair with one of their co-workers; both are married to other people. That\u2019s the background. The foreground in this particular novel concerns the murder of well-known columnist Damon Blundy, who was known for his unpopular opinions and Twitter flare-ups with famous folks he\u2019s taken to task. It\u2019s pretty clear he was incredibly obnoxious in life; in death, he\u2019s discovered bound and suffocated in his home while his wife, two floors away, heard nothing.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re also introduced to Nicki, who clearly has some kind of secret though the exact nature and depth of her secret are Hannah\u2019s concern through much of the novel. On the surface, Nicki is an average housewife with two young children living a blameless suburban existence. Who of us are who we seem to be on the surface, however? And that is indeed Hannah\u2019s main theme in a twisty novel that finds Nicki\u2019s life blown apart as the police take her in for questioning about Blundy\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n

Hannah is excellent at both character creation and at complex plotting. Her novels always take a good long while to unravel, usually containing a surprise ending, and this one is no different. Along the way, Hannah examines \u201cnormal\u201d marriage and \u201cnormal\u201d middle-class life and finds that none of it is actually normal. As Nicky\u2019s story and Damon\u2019s draw closer together, Hannah includes a glam former MP and a nutty writer of horror fiction, all grist to Simon\u2019s mill as he uncovers rocks in search of the answer to who killed Damon Blundy. Postmortem, his unpleasant character emerges fully from the folds of Hannah\u2019s storytelling.<\/p>\n

Complex, thoughtful, even profound (I found her description of the interior of a woman\u2019s purse especially memorable), she also takes a bit of a long time to get where she\u2019s going. In this novel, I found the journey worthwhile, as the denouement and motives were believable and satisfying. Sometimes the motives attributed to her killer or the unveiling of the central villain (who often is the dead person) are either not believable or too sketchy. This novel did not have that problem and really, it\u2019s a true pleasure to join the twisted mind of Sophie Hannah as she explicates a murder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As with Tana French, I have a love\/hate relationship with Sophie Hannah, an extremely talented writer who nevertheless (like Tana French) tends to dilly-dally a bit in the middle of her books. Hannah\u2019s books are a series but the series characters are merely a very loose binder for the truly spectacular set-ups Hannah comes up … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-1780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-psychological"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1782,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions\/1782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}