February 18, 2013
Moody (Dancing in the Dark) packs this flimsy story with improbabilities, and making the characters comment “This is all too much of a coincidence” doesn’t fool the readers into ignoring the author’s clumsy engineering. Kate Lennox survived a car wreck in Ecuador that killed her dad, his assistant, and her stepmother and stepsister. She can’t remember much of that day or how the accident occurred, and it haunts her. Years later, she’s in England, trying to work through a recent divorce, find a job that will get her away from a man she thinks is stalking her, and get a place of her own; but each achievement connects her anew to that awful day in Ecuador. Moody’s stream-of-consciousness style bogs down with six different viewpoint characters, and her usual tight plotting has gone AWOL, leaving numerous threads unresolved.
February 1, 2013
The puzzle of a long-past accident brings together a diverse group of survivors and suspects. Ten years ago, waitress Kate Fullerton survived her father, stepmother and stepsister in a suspicious auto accident in South America. Kate, who remembers little of the accident, married and divorced an attractive con artist who spent her inheritance. Kate moved in with her brother Magnus Lennox, an attractive but vague college professor immersed in Russian history, who encourages her to go back to school or find a better job. After being constantly harassed by Stefan, a frequent customer at the restaurant where she works, she happily accepts a position at a travel agency, where her new boss, Janine, offers to share her apartment. When Jefferson Andrewes, who makes his living untangling fraudulent schemes for a bank, arrives to book a trip and Kate suggests South America, she does not know that his own mother had also died there in an auto accident. Jefferson's parents had been divorced and his mother remarried to a wealthy man whose source of income has always been mysterious to Jefferson. Meanwhile, Janine's wealthy older lover, whose own business raises question marks for Janine, asks her to look at his books, as he suspects that he's being ripped off. When Kate is kidnapped and held captive by Stefan, both Janine and Jefferson report her missing, but the police do little to help. What do these characters' disparate pasts have to do with their present problems, and what do those problems have to do with each other? Moody (Dancing in the Dark, 2012, etc.) concocts an addictive, ironic and darkly suspenseful combination of mystery and romance.
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Starred review from January 1, 2013
Ever since she was involved in a dreadful car crash in Ecuador 10 years earlier, which killed her father, stepmother, and eight-year-old half-sister and left her with physical and emotional scars, Kate has been at loose ends. After a lackluster series of menial jobs and a failed marriage, she now lives with her brother, Magnus, and works in a bar, one of whose customers has become far too friendly. Time, Kate tells herself, to pick up the still-scattered pieces of her life and move on. First, a new job, then a new apartment, maybe even a boyfriend. Taking a new job in a travel agency, finding a new apartment, and moving out of her brother's house, Kate feels sure this is the start of a better, happier life. What she can't know is that every step she has taken will irretrievably and bizarrely lead her back to a winding mountain road in Ecuador and the tragedy that changed her life a decade earlier. Menacing, creepy, eccentric, tense, brutal, cleverly observant of human foibles, and at times funny enough to make the reader laugh out loud, this is Moody at her best. An outstanding psychological thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)