Review by New York Times Review
Say something nasty about a child - even if it's true, and even if it's your own child - and there's hell to pay. Geraldine Bretherick, a stay-at-home mom, does that very thing in Sophie Hannah's new psychological-suspense thriller, THE WRONG MOTHER (Penguin, paper, $15), and sure enough, she's dead before the story starts. Hannah also wrote persuasively about modern women who buckle under the stress of motherhood in "Little Face," but characters in that novel felt compassion for the young mother who insisted that someone had switched newborns on her. Here, everyone hates Geraldine and recoils from the sentiments that come to light in her journal. "There's a 'conspiracy of silence' about what motherhood is really like," she wrote, between her fierce and funny rants against manipulative children who torment their exhausted mothers. No wonder the police are easily persuaded that Geraldine killed herself after drowning her daughter. Sally Thorning, the personable young wife and mother who relates portions of the narrative, isn't so sure. The previous year, in a desperate attempt to call a timeout from her own demanding domestic life, she had a brief affair with Geraldine's husband. But with the murder-suicide all over television, Sally realizes that the man who called himself Mark Bretherick was someone else. Before she can convince the obtuse cops that a more subtle cruelty is at work, another mother and child are found dead, and Sally knows her own life is in danger. Hannah goes in for all those bizarre plot twists and outlandish behaviors that have come to define the psychological-suspense story, but she does it with style and wit. And while these Gothic chords bring a dissonant note to the realistic chapters written in the police-procedural format, they can't muffle the voices of the women in this story who persist in speaking intimately and honestly about the pressures on them as supermoms. Maybe Geraldine never actually answered her daughter's question about whether Jesus went to "the heaven hotel" when he died with the flip response that, from what little she knew of him, "Jesus might prefer to go camping in the Lake District." But even saintly Sally, who works in environmental engineering, confides that chasing after two obstreperous children and catering to a distracted husband can make her feel as if her brain "has silted up and needs dredging," like the lagoons of Venice. What's it worth to save a marriage? Animal sacrifice is presented as an option in NEW WORLD MONKEYS (Shay Areheart, $23), an imaginative first novel by Nancy Mauro that's more entertaining than couples therapy. Lily and Duncan, a self-absorbed young couple from Manhattan, are driving up to their country place in Dutchess County when they hit a wild boar (the town mascot, but how were they to know?), which Lily finishes off with a tire iron. Shortly after, while digging a garden, Duncan unearths a human bone and a grave marker identifying the person as "Tinker, 1902." The exhumation that Lily and Duncan secretly carry out each weekend somehow becomes emblematic of their efforts to get beneath the civilized surface of their joyless marriage and unleash the primal beast within. Following the developments of this surreal plot is fun for a while, but the animal imagery becomes stifling, as does the brainy couple's incessant analysis of their every thought, word and gesture. "Maybe I've started swinging from the trees," Duncan says after giving Lily a slap on the behind. And maybe not. Just when you think you've got his number, Robert B. Parker pulls another bluff. THE PROFESSIONAL (Putnam, $26.95) opens with a standard challenge for Spenser, the knight-errant in this enduring private-eye series: rescue the ladies from the dragon and be quick about it. Four Boston women are being blackmailed by the worst kind of cad - the kind who keeps incriminating evidence that he threatens to show their rich husbands - and Spenser, who loves women and despises cads, is happy to take their case. But Gary Eisenhower, the cad in question, turns out to be such an amiable guy that, after mediating that unpleasant blackmail matter, Spenser makes it his business to protect Gary from the mobster husband of one of his victims. For some reason, the manliest of detectives becomes fascinated by the psychology of the ladies' man, and instead of bruising his knuckles on this case, he spends most of his time wittily discussing it with Susan Silverman, the psychotherapist who is his designated "honey bun." Maybe she knows what's up with the big guy. Ever since he started writing with his son Felix, Dick Francis seems to have found fresh inspiration at the racetrack. Ned Talbot, the protagonist of EVEN MONEY (Putnam, $26.95), is not a jockey or a trainer or any other typical Francis hero. He's a bookie - one of the "pariahs of the racing world." But because he sports the Francis colors of honesty, bravery and fair play, Ned is up to the job of finding the gremlin who upsets the Royal Ascot races by tampering with the electronic equipment that determines betting odds. It takes more guts for Ned to solve the murder of a stranger who has just introduced himself as his father. The neatest feat he pulls off, however, is giving readers a new perspective on the races that are a staple of this series. The track atmosphere is quite different down here among the independent turf accountants who are fighting off the big betting shops that are wringing much of the eccentric charm from a day at the races. Sophie Hannah's thriller deals with modern women who buckle under the stress of motherhood.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The stress of mothering young children while working outside the home is at the center of this British mystery that's part psychological thriller and part police procedural. Much as she loves her four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, Sally Thorning jumps at the chance to take a weeklong work trip abroad and catch up on her sleep. When the trip falls through, she secretly books the time at a hotel, where she impulsively spends the week with a man who introduces himself as Mark Bretherick. A year later she's shocked at news of the apparent familicide deaths of Geraldine Bretherick and her five-year-old daughter. Not only is Sally a dead ringer for Geraldine, but the grieving husband and father is not the man she knew as Mark. (Family men here are absent, preoccupied, deceptive, or delusional.) As the risk to Sally increases, her anonymous notes to police lead to the discovery of other bodies, with canny investigation by romantically involved Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse and Detective Sergeant Charlie Zailer, introduced in Little Face (2007). A best-seller in Britain, where it was published in 2008 as The Point of Rescue, this gripping novel deserves similar success here.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sally Thorning, part-time environment rescuer and full-time mother, struggles to maintain her sanity and juggle the overwhelming demands of work and home in this superior psychological mystery from British author Hannah (Little Face). During a week away from her husband and children, Sally has a brief affair. A year later a local headline tragedy-Sally's lover's wife appears to have murdered her six-year-old daughter then committed suicide-reveals that Sally's lover was not who he claimed to be and she needs to find out why. After surviving a shove in front of a bus, Sally re-examines that unwise affair as she plays amateur detective and nearly loses all she values in the process. The story alternates between Sally's confessional and a tight police procedural interspersed with evidence-pages torn from the diary of the alleged daughter-killer. Paced like a ticking time bomb with flawlessly distinct characterization, this is a fiercely fresh and un-put-downable read. 5-city author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
