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Lisa has been living quietly for some time, a single mom with a mid-teen daughter Ava, in a life carefully constructed to keep them hidden from the husband Lisa ran away from after their terrible marriage tumbled into abuse. It has been long enough that Ava neither knows nor understands her mother's secrecy or her mousy protective ways. Neither does Lisa's present-day best friend and co-worker Marilyn. Marilyn fruitlessly keeps urging Lisa to get out and begin dating.
But Lisa is not the only one with secrets. Marilyn has serious ones of her own. And now that Ava is turning sixteen, she is piling up a bunch of her own: like deliberately having first time sex with the boyfriend she's pretty much done with and the online relationship she has been eagerly drawn into with an older man who "loves" her and wants her to run away to meet him.
Small things begin to make Lisa more and more uneasy, almost what she herself would call paranoid. A photo disappears and the one that stood beside it has had its frame broken, a familiar baby's plaything is leaning against a neighbor's gate in the rain, and maybe someone has been in her house.
And now we, the dear readers, begin to suspect that Lisa's past before her awful marriage may be more horrible than the one she admits at least to herself that she has escaped.
Things come to a head and begin to really churn when Ava saves a toddler from drowning and her picture appears in the news on tv and in the newspapers. Lisa considers fleeing again. And then Ava disappears and there do not appear to be any clues at all to what has happened to her.
We have all the makings of a great psychological thriller: secrets, manipulations, terrible pasts, and enormously strained relationships. Sarah Pinborough juggles everything masterfully to the very end. And if the denouement is mightily far-fetched, blame the genre rather than the author. Pinborough falls right into the success patch with this one.
§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.
Reviewed by Diana Borse, August 2018
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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