Review by Booklist Review
When Eleanor, Nancy, and Mary first met as young students at Oxford, it was the start of a long-time friendship. Nearly 30 years later, the shock of Nancy's murder forces her friends to confront their pasts along with the complexities of their current realities. For Eleanor, never married, her grief is complicated by a passionate affair with Nancy's now widowed husband, Richard, as well as trying to reconcile her relationships with Nancy and those around her. While the investigation into Nancy's murder is the electric cord charging Hall's (Our Kind of Cruelty, 2018) absorbing novel, it also tracks the journeys of the friends and reveals Nancy's perspective leading up to her death. Regarded by others as seemingly having it all, she actually struggled deeply with her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Mary, the seemingly timid one, must confront the complications of her husband's infidelities as harrowing choices and secrets are revealed. Hall's astute novel unravels a gripping mystery and explores the complicated shifts of personal and familial relationships and the conflicts between societal expectations and inner desires.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This heart-wrenching psychological thriller from British author Hall (Our Kind of Cruelty) charts the fraught lives of three best friends from university. Nancy Hennessy has stayed ostensibly close to Eleanor Meakins and Mary Smithson in the nearly three decades since they were at Oxford together. When Nancy is murdered after meeting with her secret lover, Eleanor's affair with Nancy's husband becomes so engrossing and guilt-wracked that it keeps Eleanor from helping Mary with her husband's illness. Three successive narratives center on the interior life of each woman: Eleanor immediately after the murder, Nancy in the time leading up to her death, and Mary further along in the murder's aftermath. Hall shows each woman being emotionally drawn to doing something she knows is awful, revolting against feeling trapped, and feeling separated from her support system by guilt, evoking both empathy and outrage in the reader. The suspense alone is crafted skillfully enough to hold interest, but the dark portrait of the stifling nature of contemporary womanhood makes this story really stick. Agent: Lizzy Kremer, David Higham (U.K.). (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
It comes as a terrible shock when Nancy Hennessy is murdered. She had a great life: she was wealthy, beautiful; and well loved by her husband and family and her two best friends, Mary and Eleanor. But immediately following her death, secrets begin to come out, including Nancy's long-term affair with a lover whose identity she took to her grave. The investigation into Nancy's death seems to be going nowhere, yet it uncovers details about Nancy that make her closest friends realize just how little they knew her. As they deal with their grief and try to track down the killer, they begin to doubt their relationships with Nancy as well as with each other. Hall's (Our Kind of Cruelty) absorbing psychological thriller is much more than a classic whodunit. Readers who think they finally know who the killer is will be confounded by the twists and turns the plot takes. VERDICT Told from the viewpoints of Nancy and her two friends, the story goes deep into guilt, love, and the ties that bind us. Recommended for fans of Paula Hawkins. [See Prepub Alert, 11/25/19.]--Kristen Calvert, Dallas P.L., TX
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Three British women have been best friends since their days at Oxford…and then there were two. Nancy is the beautiful, rich blonde who is cheating on her husband; dumpy Eleanor is married to her career of humanitarian work overseas; Mary is the harried mother of three whose professor husband can barely manage to stop by the house between affairs. As the novel opens, Nancy has turned up dead after a rendezvous with her mystery lover, of whom no one knows a thing. Or just one small, possibly false, thing--she told Eleanor his first name was David. Hall's fifth novel takes a refreshing approach to the multiple-narrator thriller, eschewing at least two tired gambits: back-and-forth chapters between two points of view and tricking the reader by having a narrator withhold information. So thank you for that, Ms. Hall. The first third of the book, in which the crime is discovered and investigated, belongs to Eleanor, whose grief drives her to some uncharacteristic--and not very nice--behavior. The second part moves back in time and gives us Nancy's view of things prior to her demise. "I love what every man has always loved about you," says her lover. "Your perfection." Struggling most of her life with depression, Nancy certainly doesn't feel perfect. What's more, she wants out of this affair. The final section is Mary's, and it culminates in a satisfying solution to the crime plus an improbably happy ending, given that we're three corpses in. The murder-mystery aspect of the book is handled well, but the psychological novel is a little on the slow side, with much ruminating on the part of each character, and the Betty Friedan--era feminist themes--career vs. family, the awfulness of housework, the constriction of traditional gender roles--feel oddly dated. Good bone structure. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
