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With the wild success of GONE GIRL, it should be little surprise that strained, strange relationships between husbands and wives should take on new prominence in the mystery genre. While this newest book by Jamie Mason does echo the best elements of surprise of that novel, they have become uniquely their own in her hands. Mason has taken the marriage arrangement and flipped it, twisted, and made it into something memorable.
The story centers on and is told by Dee Aldrich (dubbed "Plucky" by her mother). Raised under the guidance of a single mother, her childhood was anything but usual. While her mother never explained her career, it's clear that she worked for the CIA as a field agent. She never told Plucky or her brother Simon about what she did, but she did provide them with the tools any good agent in the field needed.
Learning intelligence skills was made enjoyable as games unique to their family. (For example: name five things that the man behind them in the grocery line had in his cart.) While those of us with normal childhoods might consider this, at best, unusual, for Plucky and Simon, these skills would have real value and meaning in their adult years.
Simon goes into police work as an adult (or does he?), while Dee tries to make her life and marriage into the antithesis of everything her childhood was. She strives for normal: with her life and in her marriage. However, despite her best efforts, things are not going well between her and her husband. Which of them is keeping more lies and secrets is a real question.
When Dee notices a strange car following her one day, she begins to see the wisdom of her mother's games. In fact, it may be those very gifts that enable her to save her own life, for better or worse.
§ Christine Zibas is a freelance writer and former director of publications for a Chicago nonprofit.
Reviewed by Christine Zibas, March 2015
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