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We all know the cliché - if you remember the 60s, you weren't there. Janice Keaton, the protagonist of Laura Wilson's latest standalone, was certainly there and she does remember quite a bit. Most particularly, she remembers the event that changed the course of her life when she was nineteen - the birth of her daughter whom she was pressured by her parents into giving up for adoption. She had heard nothing of her for over forty years until one day a woman calls to inform her that her brother Dan has died and that she herself was Janice's daughter Suzie. She also remembers, and not with fondness, Suzie's father, who encouraged her to keep the child and then, mid-way through her pregnancy, declared that after all, parenthood was not his thing.
Immediately, the guilt-ridden Janice hares off to Norfolk to meet her daughter and establish what relationship she can with her. She not only has to try to become a mother, but Suzie herself has a child, ten-year-old Molly, so Janice is a grandmother as well. And Molly is not an easy child. Unhappy at home, unhappy at school, she has convinced herself that she is really Phoebe Piper, a little girl who unaccountably disappeared a few years earlier and who has been "spotted" recently. Molly looks much like the artificially-aged photo of Phoebe in the papers and Molly has convinced herself that she is really the missing child.
Back in Norfolk, Janice discovers that one of her (many) lovers from the old days, Joe Vincent, once of a popular rock band from which he had simply walked away one day with neither explanation nor excuse, was living reclusively in the neighbourhood. Her brother had been a roadie for that same group. And now he is dead and there appears to be some question about the cause.
Worse is to come. Molly abruptly disappears and there are fears that she has met the same fate as other little girls who periodically have vanished over the years never to be seen again. Joe seems to have some relevant knowledge, but he also bears the signs of damage from his drug-addled past; at least he is in a very delicate mental state. And a body found in a makeshift camp in the woods is identified as another survivor from that period, a drug dealer once known as Magic Malc.
It is reasonable to term Laura Wilson an historical novelist, one specializing in mid-20th century Britain. Her DI Stratton series takes its hero from the Blitz to the later 1950s. Many of her stand-alones likewise are anchored in the 40s and 50s but edge closer to the present (HELLO BUNNY ALICE, for example). Certainly she is brilliantly able to evoke past decades so that we feel them as though they were memories, even when none of us were born at the time. THE WRONG GIRL, though set in the present, harks back to a past that some of us may indeed remember (though Wilson can't; she was born in 1964) even if we were there. It is, however, the particular state of mind of the mid-60s and early 70s rather than the details of clothing and food and atmosphere that is most compelling here.
Even more compelling is Wilson's depth of characterization. No one in the book is without deep flaws, even Molly, though of course she is only ten. Janice, her daughter, Joe, Dan (though dead), and Suzie's father are all difficult people and yet Wilson is fully able to make us care about them and wish them well. The tangled and perhaps ambiguous relationship between mothers and daughters, in this case covering four generations, is at the heart of the book as it is in life itself.
Happy endings are unlikely for this lot and yet we hope they may occur. Of course the book provides everything we look for in the best crime fiction - a mystery, suspense, a plot, a solution are all there. But more importantly is an emotional depth and a profound empathy for the messes we wander into and cannot easily find our way out of. While I would never accuse Laura Wilson of "transcending" the genre, she does much to enlarge it.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2016
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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