Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Poppy is a New York photographer running a successful agency with her husband Jack until the morning Jack is bludgeoned to death while running in the park.
Stricken by grief, anger and guilt Poppy is bolstered from after-shock by medication and her therapist while nurtured and sustained by her lifelong friend Layla and her attentive husband. But it is the very attentiveness of this couple, their penthouse, the chauffeured car, not to speak of the unidentified pills Layla thrusts upon her that grates on Poppy, driving her back to her old empty apartment, and, predictably, causing the reader to smell a rat.
Poppy is hallucinating, haunted by Jack’s terrible ghost, downing pills for the pain, others to make her sleep, some to stop her sleeping with nightmares. There were four lost days immediately after the funeral when no one, least of all herself, knew where she was, what happened, only that she came home, sick and ravaged, in a strange red frock and scarlet heels. She was, for a short time a suspect in her own husband’s murder, quickly ruled out, but, a year later, still closely attended by the friendly meaty Detective Grayson, who, long after the event, comes up with the information that Jack’s death was not random, but the work of a hitman, the fee $1000. So who hired him, and why?
Between Poppy’s dreams, memories, her imagination and reality we move slowly through the book but around halfway the action becomes upbeat, characters fleshing out at the same time that Poppy becomes less dependent on drugs. At some point she rids herself of Layla’s suspect tablets. Her mother appears: possessive; Jack’s bereaved mother: stalwart, indomitable. There is Merlinda, an exotic and grand old psychic fraud but basically sound as a bell. And finally there is Noah, a sculptor, deliverer or demon. She’s warned. There is no need for the reader to scream “Look behind you!” Grayson, Layla, her husband, everyone seems to be in a conspiracy to protect Poppy, that disaster-prone and vulnerable woman, from the ultimate predator.
The climax is Grand Guignol, the denouement exposing the simplest of plots on which has been built a towering edifice of obfuscation. Unger’s research is probing, her sources meticulously acknowledged, her editorial staff courteously appreciated.
A psychological thriller of the first order and an absorbing read.
