Lying in Wait – Liz Nugent #Bookreview

Published by Penguin

Ebook: 14 July 2016 | Paperback: 5 January 2017

The last people who expect to be meeting with a drug-addicted prostitute are a respected judge and his reclusive wife. And they certainly don’t plan to kill her and bury her in their exquisite suburban garden.

Yet Andrew and Lydia Fitzsimons find themselves in this unfortunate situation.

While Lydia does all she can to protect their innocent son Laurence and their social standing, her husband begins to falls apart.

But Laurence is not as naïve as Lydia thinks. And his obsession with the dead girl’s family may be the undoing of his own.

***

“My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it”.

Another killer first line from Liz Nugent. As with her debut novel ‘Unravelling Oliver‘ (which I loved, reviewed here), the story starts with a sentence that will immediately hook you in. There are only three narrators – Lydia (the wife), Laurence (Lydia’s son) and Karen (Annie Doyle’s sister) but their first person voices tell a story that will have you scrabbling to turn those pages.

The story begins in 1980.  Annie Doyle will soon be dead and the sad truth is that few people will miss her.  We know who killed her and why but for her family the torment will be endless.  Through these three voices we see how the ramifications of her death affect the two families.

There are characters that you may feel sympathy for and others whose actions are so callous and monstrous that they take your breath away.  Jealousy, obsession, manipulation, and plain old fashioned greed are at the heart of the story but as you learn more about the characters and in some cases, their backstories,  you can’t help but wonder whether some people are just born with that evil gene or are they changed by circumstance and their upbringing?  The author has a very clean and easy style of writing which I do enjoy.  Purely matter of fact prose; no flowery words or phrases – just a careful drip feed of suspense and tension.

This isn’t a lengthy book at just over 300 pages but heavens what a lot of story it packs in and of course it wouldn’t be a Liz Nugent book without those twists.   I really didn’t want to put it down. I’m not going to say anymore about the story because I really don’t want to give anything away.  Just read the book.  I thought it was a fabulous read and well worthy of a 5* rating.

Unravelling Oliver made it into my Top Books of 2014 list.  I have a feeling that Lying in Wait might just be one of my top books of 2016.

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the digital copy to review.

About the author:

Before becoming a full-time writer Liz Nugent worked in Irish film, theatre and television. In 2014 her first novel, Unravelling Oliver, was a No.1 bestseller and won the Crime Fiction prize in the 2014 Irish Book Awards. Her second novel, Lying in Wait, went straight to No 1 in the Irish bestseller charts and remained there for nearly two months. She lives in Dublin with her husband.

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