What starts as an interesting premise quickly devolves into oh no she didn’t territory in husband and wife team Nicci French’s 2019 thriller The Lying Room. I have a read a few of French’s novels (Catch Me When I Fall, Until It’s Over, Dark Saturday, and a handful of others that predate this blog) and for the most part I have enjoyed them, particularly Killing Me Softly.
In this story, married mother of three Neve gets a text from her boss and lover, Saul, to meet her at their Covent Garden love nest, but when she arrives she discovers him dead – his head bashed in with a hammer. I mean, the sensible thing to do is call the police, but Neve doesn’t do that. Instead she imagines the fallout if her betrayal is discovered, especially for her teenage daughter Mabel.
What would happen when she discovered that her mother had been having an affair, that her beloved father had been betrayed? Would everything unravel, the life that had been so painstakingly stitched back together?
In that instance, Never makes a decision. She decides to erase all trace of herself from the apartment and spends the next while scrubbing and cleaning and collecting any evidence that Saul was anything other than her boss. Yeah, that’ll end well.
It isn’t until later that she discovers that she left a piece of recognizable jewelry behind and when she returns to the scene of the crime…
There are a lot of characters in French’s book. There’s Neve and her immediate family, including her stay-at-home husband, Fletcher. There’s her three college besties (with whom she started a business called Sans Serif, which was purchased by Saul’s company); there’s the detective investigating Saul’s murder and Saul’s wife, Bernice, who comes to Neve – Lord knows why – to confide that she thinks Saul was having an affair. It’s not hard to keep track of them, but Neve (and presumably the reader) finds it increasingly difficult to know who to trust. People keep secrets, that’s a fact, and as Neve continues to lie about her involvement with Saul in an effort to protect – or, at least that’s what she tells herself she’s doing – her family, her life starts to unravel.
I mean, people love this book. Sure, pages were turned and I read it to the end. But – I didn’t care about any of these people, least of all Neve. It was, for me, a wholly unsatisfying read.
The Ludic Reader 