Library Limelights 273

 

Katherine Faulkner. Greenwich Park. New York: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Helen is pregnant; her husband Daniel is thrilled. Serena is pregnant; her husband Rory, Helen’s brother, is less hands-on. Rachel is pregnant; the father of her baby is out of the picture. After meeting at prenatal classes, brash Rachel gradually worms her way into a reluctant Helen’s life, an unwanted disturbance. Eliciting sympathy one night in tears and bruises, she ends up staying in Helen and Daniel’s house. Rory and Daniel head up a prominent London architectural firm, with their current gentrification project getting a lot of negative press. Helen and Rory’s brother Charlie, who runs a music venue cum bar, has an on-again, off-again relationship with journalist Katie, who is definitely not pregnant. She is covering the trial of two men for rape, recalling a similar event of years past, when courtroom tactics pilloried and shamed the testifying victim: the men were acquitted.

Helen’s boredom with maternity leave, and penchant for snooping, leads her to suspect brother Rory of having an affair; a traumatic event in the past of this foursome is hinted at. Daniel works long office hours while Rory seems to goof off. Helen dismisses mysterious phone calls as phishing. Rachel’s untidy presence and mood swings become too much; she’s even inserted herself into their social life. Finally, at her own boisterous November bonfire party, Helen lets loose and demands that Rachel move out, accusing her of theft that Rachel denies. Next day Helen has trouble remembering the details, but certainly Rachel is gone.

Before long, Rachel becomes a missing persons case; she was never seen after that party. The police and media are on it. Katie wants to help calm her friend Helen, contacting a retired cop she knows. Discovering that Rachel used to work at Charlie’s bar is only the first step of exposing the true surreptitious activities among these people we think we’ve come to know. Narrated mainly by Helen, with input from Katie and Serena—plus, a letter from prison. Reading such a masterfully-crafted crime drama is a sheer pleasure from start to finish. Incredibly, this is a first novel—perfectly structured, paced, and peopled. Don’t let it be the only one from this gifted author!

One-liners

▪ I start a tentative wave, but instead she stands up and pulls me into a bear hug, as if we’re old friends who haven’t met in ages, rather than near strangers who met just a few days before. (18)

▪ Positioning myself so I can’t be seen, I delete the search history. (56)

▪ I have a sickening sense that I have found something I wasn’t supposed to see, something bad. (66)

▪ For a mad moment, I think about the note, tucked in the back of the book on my bedside. (91)

▪ “You remember me, Serena, don’t you?” (102)

▪ “Do you want me to go?” she whispers, glancing at Daniel, who now has his back to us. (129)

Multi-liners

▪ Did I tell Rachel that Serena was a photographer? I must have, although I don’t remember it. (49)

▪ How grateful I should be to have a loving husband. Imagine being pregnant and going home to an empty house. (51)

▪ Why would you suspect she would go and poke around up there? Because it’s exactly the sort of thing you would do, a voice in my head answers. (91)

▪ “You should report him, Rachel,” I say. “Whoever did this to you.” (129)

▪ “Is Rachel OK? When you say missing—she’s not in any trouble or anything, is she?” (219)

▪ “I can’t believe he knew her,” Serena murmurs. “Do you think that the baby is his?” (285)

▪ “Helen, don’t be ridiculous! None of this is your fault.” (287)

Another coincidence

“You again!” Rachel folds the newspaper and rushes over, still carrying it, bumping into the backs of people’s chairs. She is wearing a gold sequined skirt, oversized black T-shirt, and green sneakers. “How funny!” She launches herself at me with a hug. I feel myself slightly limp in her grip. Katie looks at me expectantly.

“This is Rachel,” I say when she releases me. “Rachel, this is my friend Katie.” They smile at each other. I pause. “Rachel and I met at our prenatal class.”

“And now we just seem to keep bumping into each other!” Rachel laughs loudly at her own joke. In the cafe, heads turn to see what all the fuss is about. “What are you doing here?”

“We were planning to have lunch,” Katie says. “But it looks like they’re full.”

“Come and sit here, with me!”

I glance at Rachel’s table. She has bagged the best spot in the cafe, right by the window, exactly where I’d hoped we could sit. But the thought of her joining us makes my heart sink. (77)

Mystifying

And then there are the marks on her neck. They are almost gone now, faded to little clouds of yellowish gray. Barely noticeable. How did she get them? Who wants to hurt her? And above all, why is she still living in our house, sitting and eating breakfast with us, coming out with her weird, jarring small talk? What does she want from us?

I am desperate to talk to Daniel about it properly. Daniel always knows the right thing to do. We used to talk about things like this, solve problems together. We used to feel like a team. I can’t bear this distance that seems to be opening up between us since she’s been staying. (163)

Teresa Dovelpage. Death Under the Perseids. Ebook download from TPL. New York: Soho Press, 2021.

Merceditas is a rather irritating woman who won a free cruise to her native Cuba, along with her depressed husband Nolan who just lost his job as a professor. “Mercy” is eager to visit her mamina during the one-day stopover in Havana. Several years after dumping love-of-her-life Lorenzo in Havana, she’s been living in Florida with the more substantial Nolan. Impulsive and opportunistic, overly fond of cocktails, Mercy seems occasionally to regret her past unfaithfulness although we understand that Lorenzo has since died. The ship gets spooky as she realizes that Cubans from Lorenzo’s past are also on board, suspiciously they too being “free cruise” winners. And they start disappearing—after giving Mercy unexpected or conflicting information about Lorenzo’s death. Part of Lorenzo’s history involves a novel he wrote called Las Perseidas, for which he mistakenly spent time in prison. His unscrupulous friend Javier later published it in Spain under his own name. Javier dies in the ship’s library, accidentally, or ...?

When the cruise reaches Havana, Nolan expects to meet a colleague who’d invited him to deliver a lecture, but Nolan completely disappears too. Frightened and puzzled, Mercy finds comfort with mamina but ends up mooning around the house where she and Lorenzo once lived. She wonders if it’s true that Lorenzo had a big fight with his best friend Kiel on the night he died. And why does the handsome, kind taxi driver remind her of Lorenzo? Watching a display of the Perseid meteor showers is awkwardly worked into the mysteries before Mercy, husband-less, returns to Florida. The way Mercy discovers what happened to Lorenzo and Nolan and the shipboard Cubans is unlikely, as is the literary device itself—not the only hole in this odd tale. Then again, it imparts a good sense of life in Cuba today, and plenty of untranslated but probably useful Spanish swear words.

Bits

▪ I wore my blond hair long and wasn’t shy to flaunt my toned legs and generous derriere. (17)

▪ How many free cruises had Nautilus given away—to people who didn’t even remember signing up for the deal? (34)

▪ It had been so easy to seduce him, to make him forget he even had a wife. (49)

▪ “Publishers kept waiting for me to write another bestseller, but I didn’t have Lorenzo’s talent.” (65)

▪ Books were Lorenzo’s life and world, and it had been hard for him to accept that other people didn’t share his passion. (75-6)

▪ “Someone has brought all of us here.” (127)

▪ “You have a drinking problem,” he stated, more serious than I had ever seen him. “Mercy, you need to go get help.” (136)

▪ Nolan was a levelheaded guy. If he didn’t see a reason for being alarmed, there was no reason to be alarmed. (197)

▪ It had occurred to me—against all common sense―that if I pretended years hadn’t passed, if I believed Lorenzo was waiting for me, it would magically happen. (237)

▪ Yes, contrary to what Candela and, at times, Nolan himself thought, I had loved him. (249)

Tana French. The Witch Elm. Ebook download from TPL. 2018. Penguin/RandomHouse, 2019.

Toby Hennessey is a lovely Dublin guy with the sweetest girlfriend (Melissa); his work is promoting and marketing Richard’s art gallery. Then it all goes wrong when home invaders beat him savagely. Hospitalization, physiotherapy, memory loss: the psychological damage is as devastating as the physical. Recovery takes the form of moving into Ivy House, a family centre of happy childhood summers—where his Uncle Hugo lives alone, slowly dying of brain cancer, needing companionship. Melissa comes too, and the weekly Hennessey family gatherings continue. Toby and his cousins Susanna and Leon are as close as siblings. How extraordinary when a skeleton is discovered in the garden, wedged in a hollow trunk area of the huge, ancient wych elm tree. Identified as a high school mate of the younger Hennesseys, Dominic disappeared ten years ago and had been considered a suicide. Detectives Rafferty and Kerr are thinking murder.

The author pays careful attention to narrator Toby’s state of mind—he struggles to recall how he had been and felt so long ago, most concerned with what he can’t remember. A long book, it’s fuelled by pages of dialogue among the three cousins, theories of how a murder might have happened, how to protect themselves from false accusations. Toby’s PTSD is a disadvantage, he’s dependent on cousin memories. Are they privately thinking that he killed Dominic? Eventually the police think so. But they arrest Hugo. Someone is rationalizing and justifying cold-blooded murder for the powerful self-confidence it bestowed. The story does not turn out as you expect. I had not read any Tana French before, clearly an oversight. She has a brilliant grip on the human psyche, employing elegant prose to transport us into different environments or even an individual’s mental chaos. Know yourself is the not-so-subtle mantra. 

Bits

▪ What if I never got another day in my life when I was normal again? (85)

▪ For better or worse, the Ivy House saved me, in the most concrete of ways. (131)

▪ The skull lay on its side in the grass, between the camomile patch and the shadow of the wych elm. (241)

▪ “The point is, even if I end up running a marathon, I’m not the same person any more.” (314)

▪ I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would get him thrown in jail, even if he had been trying to do exactly that to me. (432)

▪ I didn’t for a second consider the possibility that Hugo was telling the truth. (513)

▪ All my circuits were so overloaded with suppressed fight-or-flight that I was practically in spasm. (537)

▪ That calm, absorbed voice, breaking down the details of an interesting problem. (613)

▪ “Because Hugo knew as well as I did, if you got into a courtroom, you’d be fucked.” (670)