Many crime/mystery stories can be accurately labelled as “whodunnits“. This book is what I like to call a “didshedidn’tshedoit“ but in this case it’s which she did it and if she did it. If none of them did it, then who did? Did what, I hear you ask!
‘At an elite private school nestled in the Colorado mountains, a tangled web of lies draws together three vastly different women.
Natalie, a young office assistant, dreams of having a life like the school moms she deals with every day. Women like Brooke – a gorgeous heiress, ferociously loving mother and serial cheater - and Asha, an overachieving and overprotective mum who suspects her husband of having an affair.
The fates are bound by their relationships with the handsome, charming assistant athletic director Nicholas, who Natalie loves, Brooke wants and Asha needs. But when two bodies are carried out of the school early one morning, it seems the jealousy between mothers and daughters, rival lovers and the haves and have-nots has shattered the surface of this isolated, affluent town – a town where people will stop at nothing to get what they want.’
This is delicious. It doesn’t let up for a minute. From a tantalising prologue that suggests so much but confirms nothing this story unravels slowly and doggedly leaving you to feverishly turn the pages trying to figure it all out from the abundance of enigmatic clues left. It’s all there for the astute reader to fathom but it’s a fiendish plot that will leave you believing you’ve reasoned something out only to find - you haven’t! It’s not edge of the seat tension, it’s nuanced suspense that is sustained throughout the book. And the final denouement was unexpected.
I’ve never been to Colorado yet the portrait created here is just as I imagine it to be. One of the most expensive states in America, this small, isolated town has a privileged population all expecting to get what they want when they want it.
Natalie is the main protagonist, damaged, flawed and teetering between getting it right and getting wrong. Right away the reader is invited to believe that she may not be completely honest, and possibly unreliable, yet the skilful characterisation has you willing her to extricate herself from the situations she’s in. We are subtly invited to consider whether she is envious of the lifestyles of the school children and their parents. The other female characters are as well drawn as Natalie but they are harder to like. What I found interesting was that the behaviour of the parents towards each other almost mirrored the childrens’! Even the staff of the school seem difficult to warm to. I had a sense of an ‘us and them’ vibe, the affluent and the less affluent to put it politely. The depiction of the schoolchildren is clever because by the end of the book your opinion of them has changed when you see what they’ve been put through. But I guess you could say that of many characters, initial perceptions turn out to be wrong.
It’s a fine example of its genre, you come away having felt disturbed, angry and yet satisfied that by the end of the book everything and everyone is, more or less, resolved. Or is it?
My thanks to Joe Christie at Quercus Books for a gifted proof and a spot upon the blog tour.
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