Author: Lisa Jewell

Genre: Fiction (Mystery, Suspense)

Lisa Jewell’s books were recommended to me by a friend in my book group. I picked up the first one I saw in Barnes and Noble, and it turned out to be her latest. It had a four-star rating on Goodreads, so I decided to give it a try and I’m glad I did. I needed something compelling to read after one too many literary and non-fiction books in a row.

This novel takes place in England and is comprised of three stories, two contemporary and one from 1993. Jewell adds to the suspense in the stories themselves by limiting each chapter to only one of the three stories and occasionally using little cliffhangers at the end of a chapter. Because the next chapter picks up one of the other two stories, I was often tempted to read ahead to find out what happened next in the story from the chapter I had just finished.

One of the contemporary stories is about a 40-ish single mom, Derry, who lives on the coast. One morning, she finds a man sitting in the cold on the beach outside her cottage. When she approaches him, he says he has no idea who he is or how he got there. The second story takes place in 1993 and introduces a family with two teenage kids. They spend summer vacations in the same place on the coast every year. It seems like a simple story until the daughter begins seeing a young man who really causes her brother concern. In the third story, Jewell introduces Lily, a young woman from Ukraine who recently married an Englishman after a very brief courtship. They live in the London suburbs, where she presents herself to the police because her husband just didn’t show up from work one day and is missing. In the process, Lily and the police find out she really didn’t know her husband very well at all.

All three stories continue playing leapfrog over each other until the individual mysteries begin to gel and you start to think you might have figured out who did what – but you’d probably be wrong. For those who like more gentle mysteries, I warn you that there is a nasty fight and a little coarse language, but it is all in character, so it’s not a surprise.

Yes, I do like character-driven novels, and this one fits that bill. The writing is good, and the plotting is very good – I read the book in two days because I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next in each of the stories and if/how they all fit together in the end. But occasionally, I did find myself saying, “Oh no, don’t do it!” and of course the characters did anyway – so some readers might find that aspect frustrating or even a bit far-fetched.

I can’t say much more about the individual stories or I might spoil it for you, but I am going to read another Lisa Jewell book soon. I’ll look for one of her more highly-rated suspense novels, maybe Then She Was Gone, since a suspenseful, quick read provides a great escape, and Jewell just does suspense so well.