No, it's not a book about golf. Instead, it's early on a sunny Tuesday morning
when Erin Kennedy wakes up next to her husband Danny. She's Irish,
and a book editor, who moved to New York after a family tragedy; he's
a former NYPD cop now working homicide in a sleepy shore town in
Suffolk County, Long Island. Then, at 7:15, there's an insistent
knock at the door: Danny's partner Ben, and two uniforms, are there to
arrest Danny. He walks to the balcony, and with a look back at Erin,
jumps to his death.
Eighteen months later, Erin is in
court, charged with murder.
Jo Spain's thriller is a finely
designed construction, jumping about in time between the period of
the trial, the time of Danny's death, and the sexual assault of a
Harvard co-ed, told from the point of view of her house proctor, four
years earlier. This is not an easy trick to manage, but movement
between stories is deft and what helps is the setting, especially as
the story moves between Harvard of the past and Suffolk County in the
present. They are backgrounded sharply: the insular, almost
claustrophobic world of Harvard increase a sense of danger about the
campus; the Suffolk community is put into stark contrast by one of
Erin's allies, Cal, who comes from the Gatsbyish side of Long Island,
an uneasy fit into her world.
Of course the need to find the
resolution of each bit of story creates a web of interwoven
cliff-hangers which make The Perfect Lie compulsive reading. But
there is a problem, in order to maintain the recurring doses of
suspense, you have to withhold a lot of information from the reader:
from the Harvard backstory and its other protagonists, or the
location of its assault, right up to details Erin's trial taking
place in the present. This is an easily disturbed structure, and it
also requires a certain amount of expository prose once the
revelations begin, in order to answer some of the questions readers
are going to need resolved. The artificiality of withholding can be
irritating at times, but the positive side is that it keeps the
reader guessing, and the resolutions are, in the main, satisfying.
Spain builds Erin's character well, and Dave's by reflection, but to
some extent the other characters are limited by their function to the
plot: learning too much might uncover too much revelation. And the
moment of that revelation was, if anything, underplayed—perhaps the
need to explain how we got there overpowered the actual menace of the
situation itself. Cold blood needs to be presented as a dish served
quickly.
There is also the danger of bending
modern reality: given the amount of investigation Erin and her
friends undertake, it seems improbable that aspects of one person's
identity could be kept secret by their missing it. The pedant in me
also wishes that the American characters didn't occasionally use
Anglicisms, which Erin in narration can say to her heart's content.
But an American lawyer would never say “inland revenue” meaning
the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). Freshmen in America are never
called “freshers”, things like that. Small irritations for a
natural born Yank, but like the larger question mark, not enough to
slow down the suspense train which barrels ahead on its Long Island
Railroad (or railway?) tracks.
The Perfect Lie by Jo Spain Quercus £14.99 ISBN 9781529407242
NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
