This month’s books all provide pleasingly fresh variations on a familiar theme: a troubled person’s reluctant return home to confront old traumas, and possibly unsolved murders, from long ago. Whether this is a good plan (or not) is an open question.
The Ghostwriter
by Julie Clark
Olivia Dumont, the title character of THE GHOSTWRITER (Sourcebooks, 342 pp., $27.99), is still haunted by a tragedy from a generation earlier: the unsolved double murder in 1975 of her father’s siblings, Poppy and Danny, in Ojai, Calif. Though her father — just 16 at the time — had an alibi, he could never escape from the rumors that he was the killer.
A half-century later, Olivia is pulled back to Ojai to help her father, whom she hasn’t seen in decades, write his memoirs. It’s a disturbing task. He appears ready to tell the truth, finally, about what happened on that fateful day all those years ago — but is she ready to hear it? “There are things I never told the police,” he says, darkly.
Complicating matters is his recent diagnosis of dementia, and how his memory seems to flicker on and off. “This illness, it’s deceptive. It tricks you into thinking you have a grasp on reality, on events of the past,” he tells her, in one of his lucid moments. “But then you find out that nothing you believed is real.”
Clark’s book deftly and engagingly delves into this complicated not-so-cold case, from multiple points of view. Most affecting are a journal and some newly unearthed film footage taken by Poppy, an aspiring moviemaker and budding feminist who turns out to be the heroine of the story.
The Last Illusion of Paige White
by Vanessa McCausland
Jane Masters, the main character of THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE (Crown, 309 pp., $28), fled her small Australian hometown 19 years ago to make a new life as a newspaper reporter in Sydney. But when an old school frenemy, Paige, drowns after posting an enigmatic and disturbing photo of herself on Instagram, Jane finds herself pulled back into the past.
Was Paige killed, or did she kill herself? With few clues to go on, Jane, along with Paige’s many Instagram followers, scours that final image: a picture of Paige lying in the woods as though she were sleeping, a crown of flowers in her hair. “If you looked closely, really looked, the hair was tangled, the skin blanched, the flowers bruised,” Jane muses. “Had Paige referenced the thing they’d made a silent promise to never speak about again?”
(What thing, the reader wonders.)
McCausland expertly weaves together multiple strands of a multilayered story, including the burdens of Paige’s social-media persona and Jane’s unsatisfying relationship with her boss-with-benefits in Sydney. Jane’s search for answers takes her far back into her school days, when she and Paige formed a fraught friendship with Audrey, a new girl desperate to fit in.
McCausland is a thoughtful, subtle writer with a deep understanding of her characters’ psyches. What lends a special poignancy to the story are the chapters narrated by Paige, reflecting deep regret for her life’s mistakes. (The reader will have to suspend a bit of disbelief here.)
“My father always says that hell is a place of our own making,” Paige recalls. That’s true, in her case.
The Man Made of Smoke
by Alex North
“I could have saved him,” Dr. Daniel Garvie tells himself, thinking back to an awful incident from his childhood: the moment he encountered a sad, dirt-streaked boy gazing at him with silently pleading eyes at a highway rest stop, and yet did nothing. That boy went on, or so everyone thought, to become the final victim of a sadistic child killer known as the Pied Piper (identifying features: a tendency to whistle and a compulsion to intone the creepy phrase “nobody sees, and nobody cares”).
In North’s THE MAN MADE OF SMOKE (Celadon, 310 pp., $27.99), Dan, now a criminal profiler, is drawn back home after the apparent suicide of his father, a former police officer who never got over his obsession with the Pied Piper case. Following the clues his father has tantalizingly left behind, Dan concludes that there’s a new killer on the loose, targeting people connected to the Pied Piper murders.
Dan has a methodical, engaging way of attacking the mystery that reflects North’s adroitness in laying out the plot. It is very satisfying to watch the story’s three narrative threads from different timelines — Dan’s, his father’s and that of a young boy named James — come together in the end.
Though this book features at least one psychopathic criminal who delights in psychologically and physically torturing his victims, it never indulges in gratuitous scenes of violence, and is so well written and neatly plotted that it will appeal even to readers who usually shy away from this sort of thing.
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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