Library Limelights 266

 

Megan Miranda. Such A Quiet Place. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2021.

The village atmosphere deliberately sets this up like a cozy, but the author has no intention of helping you neatly solve a crime. In the snug community of Hollow’s Edge, most people are associated with the bucolic local college. Friends and acquaintances live, work, and often party together. But two neighbours, the Truetts, died over a year ago from carbon monoxide poisoning; it was ruled a homicide and Ruby Fletcher went to prison for it. Ruby had been living next door, the roommate of our protagonist Harper Nash. Now: Ruby’s conviction has been overturned on trial technicalities and she boldly returns, expecting they know not what. Although no motive was ever determined, all had testified in a string of evidence pointing to Ruby, who claims innocence. It’s only Harper who wrestles with ambivalence about Ruby’s guilt, recalling her kindnesses, and she is powerless to refuse her bed and board again.

Hollow’s Edge has its own message board, an email group, that serves them well for planning events. They all have security cameras. Again they activate their volunteer Neighbourhood Watch. Everyone is on edge, wondering fearfully what Ruby is up to. She disappears sometimes in the middle of the night; she took Harper’s car away for days. Her ex-boyfriend Mac has been seeing Harper; does Ruby know? Harper quietly undertakes to find out what really happened the night the Truetts died; anonymous notes scare her. Her repetitive mental gyrations over what to believe about her friend—somewhat overdone IMO―are revealing a dark side of Ruby. Clandestine neighbourhood activity comes to light, everyone with something to hide. More than one disturbing surprise follows—an excellent examination of the power of gossip, rumour, and conspiracy.

One-liners

▪ “The relationships between all of these neighbours were contentious from the start,” the lawyer said, punctuating her point with her hand on the table. (57-8)

▪ Even before she said it, I knew: “Someone’s going to pay.” (59)

▪ “Don’t let her get to you, Harper,” he said, breath next to my ear, body pressing mine into the counter. (95)

▪ “Is there a good reason to kill them, Harper?” (111)

▪ In Hollow’s Edge, someone else was always watching. (153)

▪ She’d come back to prove that someone else was guilty. (203)

Multi-liners

▪ The prosecutor had made her out to be a grifter, a thief, a sociopath—take your pick. Maybe I needed to accept that possibility, too. (53)

▪ “And, Harper?” I looked back, hand on the doorknob. “Tell her to go.” (112)

▪ The thing she had finally given voice to, unavoidable now. An open accusation that the Truetts’ murder was not at her hand but at one of ours. (181-2)

▪ Everyone taking pictures of each other, recording each other, and so we had to exist on two levels. The one where we knew we were being watched, and the one where we believed we weren’t. (319-20)

Arrogance or paranoia?

All these little mysteries. Did they even really matter? Or was I letting my mind get carried away, like this entire neighbourhood had done, working themselves into a frenzy, piecing together their story?

Look where it had gotten us.

We had been raised on true crime and the promise of viral fame. We’d consumed unsolved mysteries and developed our deeply held theories. Believed that neither law experience nor a criminal justice background was necessary to see into people’s true hearts, to root out the truth. That all you needed was a clear perspective and a sharp mind. (131)

Unsure, uneasy, unhappy

The line between culprit and victim kept shifting.

How much had I misinterpreted because I’d held my secrets close? We all had.

Ruby was right about that—how none of us ever talked face-to-face. How we talked around one another, about one another, aired our grievances in thinly veiled comments on the message board. One-upping each other in passive aggression. (271)

Defensive

Ruby might’ve been desperate to prove her innocence, but now so was I. Those were my fingerprints on that mug. That was my image on the photo left in my house. There were too many pieces that could be twisted against me, should someone want to do it. (286)

Alice Feeney. Rock Paper Scissors. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Flatiron Books/Macmillan, 2021.

A leisurely weekend in a renovated, isolated church—remedy for a marriage gone dull. Or so thinks Amelia after winning the mini-holiday in an online contest. She and Adam have grown apart, complaints and uneasy compromise being their daily life. While separately acknowledging their love for one other, and wanting to recapture better days, each seems to have a private agenda for settling their predicament. On each wedding anniversary Amelia writes a letter to Adam, an honest letter she intends never to show him, expressing her disappointments but ultimately her forever love. Adam is a busy screenwriter who adapts novels to film scripts; his big break came when renowned novelist Henry Winter chose him for an adaptation. For his part, Adam feels they must resolve their differences before heading home again. He also happens to have the rare condition called prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces.

Blackwater Chapel is not exactly the relaxing spa they expected. In fact it’s downright spooky (oh no, not a horror story!) complete with a witch-like presence in a cottage nearby—a poor creature called Robin. Their dog Bob goes missing. The couple’s bickering litany continues, becoming tiresome for the reader just when the story turns upside down. No, it’s not a horror story in a fantasy sense, but it will test your mental reflexes to the limit, make you examine automatic assumptions. The things that haunt these people are deeply hidden past experiences that introduce other characters. Identity and self-awareness are at the core of this odd thriller whether you agree with the conclusion or not.

Amelia

▪ I plan to teach my husband an important lesson this weekend and he doesn’t need his phone for that. (13)

▪ What he doesn’t know, is that if things don’t go according to plan, only one of us will be going home. (56)

▪ Sometimes I feel like I need to check out of life the way other people check out of hotels. (68)

▪ I’m sick of hearing you talk about your work as if it’s the only thing that matters. You make shit up for a living and your agent sells it. (134)

▪ I don’t know who I’m supposed to be if I can’t be the me I dreamed I would be. (138)

▪ I spent my ambition on your dreams instead of my own. (152)

▪ “You’ve abandoned all your own projects to work night and day on his.” (218)

▪ “You make me feel as though I’m not good enough every single day.” (247)

Adam

▪ Amelia, sensing defeat, uses that passive-aggressive singsong tone that used to amuse me. These days it makes me wish I was deaf. (19)

▪ I love my wife. I just don’t think we like each other as much as we used to. (21)

▪ She sulks if I’m too quiet, but opening my mouth feels like navigating a minefield. (58)

▪ “I don’t know why you are so angry all the time,” he says. (68)

▪ The second pill should do the trick—it normally does, even when I secretly crush them and put them in her tea. (145)

▪ “I’m not who I was ten years ago, and neither are you, and that’s okay.” (261)

▪ She’s lying about something, and not knowing what scares me. (266)

▪ The woman delivered emotional blackmail like a conscientious postman. (317)

Others

▪ Robin cut up all her cards a long time ago. She didn’t want anyone to have any way of finding her. (127)

▪ Robin knows things about both of them that she is certain they do not know about each other. (178)

Nathan Dylan Goodwin. The Foundlings. UK: nathandylangoodwin.com, 2021.

Sussex, England: Three different babies abandoned during the 1970s, left in public where they could soon be discovered, proved through DNA testing to share the same mother. Our man Morton Farrier, the forensic genealogist, is tasked with finding the mother. As if that weren’t enough challenge, the three now-adult women (Vanessa, Liza, and Billie) are all half-sisters of Morton’s own Aunty Margaret—previously revealed as his biological mother! But Margaret’s connection to the others is through her father, not the others’ mysterious mother. The side story of her father—Morton’s grandfather, Alfred Farrier―becomes the main story, accompanying Morton’s complex research for that young woman who gave birth several times. Using DNA connections and related sources, he can identify her as Rose Hart. Rose’s nefarious activities come to light, including crossing paths with a messed-up Alfred Farrier.

Resources at Morton’s command seem endless, although his skill at connecting dozens of dots is what counts. The necessary DNA tracking might make you dizzy. Rose’s trail leads him far and wide, through hospital records, archives, newspapers, and more; he meets the policewoman she almost murdered, he confers with police in Nevada. Some of the family discoveries impact Morton’s own emotional equilibrium. Alfred’s involvement does not seem like the kindly grandfather Morton recalls. More worrisome, how will Aunty Margaret and her half-sisters react when he delivers his disturbing discoveries?

Goodwin has done a stellar job in constructing an exciting plot that weaves between two time periods, expertly building suspense. Inventing “trees” for the three half-siblings back to the great-grandparents of each is no mean feat by the author, let alone navigating a multitude of assisting sources. Of the numerous cases he’s undertaken in his career, it seems Morton’s own family is the most complicated of all, secrets within secrets.

One-liners

▪ How were Vanessa and her half-sisters going to take the news about their biological mother who, it appeared, might have had a serious criminal background and who had gallivanted around the country, abandoning her babies in shop doorways. (44-5)

▪ “So, I don’t offer you any firm guarantees that one day that boy won’t be able to find out who his birth parents were.” (59)

▪ “He said he was the baby’s grandfather!” the nurse called. (138)

▪ “I can be Anna,” the young lady said, placing a hand gently on his thigh. (180)

Multi-liners

▪ “It isn’t yours to name,” he spluttered, thumping the plate down on the table and waking the baby directly. “It isn’t yours, Margaret.” (56)

▪ “What do you mean, ‘pay her off, once and for all’? Have you paid her something, already?” (109)

Hot chase

“We’ve had a call from a member of the public about a young lady acting suspiciously with a red and white bag out of which they believed they heard a baby crying.”

“What?” Kathy stammered. “Give me the details—quickly.”

“The call’s just come in. She was spotted entering the churchyard of All Saints in Lindfield.”

“Lindfield?” she questioned.

“Correct.”

“I can be there in five minutes,” Kathy replied, slamming down the phone and running for the front door. “Save my dinner,” she shouted down the hallway. “And the wine.”

She jumped into the CID Ford Escort, started the engine, and sped towards Lindfield her heart racing at the possibility of catching Rosie Hart in the act of another abandonment. (144)

The tree

He stared at his and Anna’s name on the rudimentary Farrier family tree in front of him. If, as he suspected was the case, the war years were to blame for some of his later difficulties, then perhaps it was time to revisit those terrible years. But he knew he would never be able to speak the words, not to his family, his friends or even to his doctor. But, he considered, looking at the paper and pencil before him, maybe he could write things down. Or, better still, type them up when Anna’s old machine came back repaired and restored.

“Grandad, are you still awake?” Morton asked. (221-2)