If you enjoy reading about female characters who are totally consumed by angst, paranoia and self-doubt, do not - repeat, do not miss this book. Not only is there one such character here, but three - and until the end, it's virtually impossible to tell who's telling the truth. It's a story with a past that began five years prior to the present day, when Mia Hamilton has finally come to grips - almost - with her husband Zach's suicide. He died on the same day that Josie, one of his university students, disappeared (he was a professor); the claim was that he and his student were having an affair that somehow went awry. The unfortunate result, it appears, is that he murdered her and took his own life in remorse.
Despite a few misgivings, Mia never believed Zach was a murderer; and now, she's getting by at their London home with help from their young daughter, Freya, her close personal boyfriend Will and Zach's ever-loving parents, who live nearby. She's undergone training as a personal counselor, seeing clients in her home office, and her life after Zach is back on a track toward normalcy. That changes, though, when a young woman named Alison seeks her out and makes an appointment. Clearly, Alison is seriously disturbed, but she makes a claim that chills Mia to the core: She knew both Josie and Zach, and more to the point, she insists Zach did not kill himself. That said, she abruptly runs off, leaving Mia to deal with the fallout and start questioning Zach's death, and just about everything else she's come to believe in, all over again.
But can what Alison says and does be trusted? Just as Mia begins to think she's the real deal, something happens that make her think she's delusional. As Mia tries to separate fact from fiction, what really happened back then is revealed to readers through flashback chapters narrated by Josie, the student supposedly murdered by Zach (I've grown weary of this technique, in all honestly, but the author does it very well). After a number of twists and turns, everything comes together in a surprising end.
That ending was not, however, all that satisfying. I'm not totally sure why, except perhaps that I never really related to any of the three women (hey, that's just me, but I prefer my female characters to be strong and mentally stable, I guess). Still another reason is that I guessed wrong - make that way wrong - so maybe my let-down is just a touch of sour grapes to compensate for being fooled. The bottom line is that this is a well-written, easy-to-read book that I really didn't want to put down. Many thanks to the publisher, via NetGalley, for the opportunity to read it in exchange for an honest review.
Silent Lies by Kathryn Croft (Bookouture, October 2017); 321 pp.
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