The Lying Room

The Lying Room is the first stand alone mystery thriller from Nicci French (the husband and wife writing team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French) since the conclusion of the Frieda Klein series.

When Neve Connolly discovers her married lover murdered in his pied-à-terre she takes a deep breath and then works methodically to remove any trace of herself from the crime scene, before returning home to her husband and three children.

“He was dead. he had been murdered. But it wasn’t about her or them. That was irrelevant to whatever it was that had happened here.”

The Lying Room is a taut character driven mystery with its focus on Neve’s desperate attempts to protect her family, and herself, from the consequences of her lover’s murder.

“There was no getting away from it. She would have to get on with her life and behave the way an innocent person would behave. The fact that she was innocent–innocent at least of the murder–was no help at all.”

The author’s characterisation is generally strong and believable. A busy wife, mother, employee and friend, Neve is an ordinary woman caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and I could empathise with her impulse to protect her family, despite her obviously shaky relationship with her husband, and daughter. Her stress and fear Is palpable as Neve frantically strives to project a sense of normalcy, even while chaos descends on her home, in the form of a parade of unwanted houseguests, and surprise visits from DI Hitching.

“Even the truth felt like a lie now.”

There are plenty of red herrings in The Lying Room to keep any armchair detective guessing. Aware that DI Hitching strongly suspects she is somehow involved, Neve eventually becomes determined to identify the killer herself, and finds herself clumsily investigating her family, and friends. I didn’t guess the identity of the killer, or their motivation, until quite late in the story, though subtle clues are present earlier.

“Almost every part of the police investigation was wrong or misleading, the crucial evidence had been removed or destroyed. Their narrative of events was entirely false. But after all of that, the conclusions were correct.”

A well written, clever, and gripping novel, The Lying Room is an entertaining mystery.

Let me begin by saying that I have been a huge Nicci French fan ever since reading THE MEMORY GAME over twenty years ago, and I have read each and every book by this fantastic writer duo as soon as they came out ever since. You can therefore imagine my joy when I received an ARC of their latest novel THE LYING ROOM from Netgalley! And I am even more delighted to say that it was another five star read for me!

To truly appreciate Nicci French novels you must know that these are slow burning, character driven mysteries. Their power lies in the keen observation of the details of ordinary people living their everyday lives. Getting up, eating breakfast, going to work, bathtime with the kids, a silly argument with your spouse, reading in your flannelette pyjamas. Boring, Except that it’s not. Because among those ordinary people usually hides evil. Ordinary person next door or psychopath? Sometimes it seems to be a very fine line. But it’s those small details that bring the characters to life, make them relatable, ratchet up tension. If it can happen to them, it could happen to us. Ordinary lives spiralling out of control through just one small decision, one white lie, one step in the wrong direction. It’s then that the ordinary becomes sinister, terrifying, the stuff of nightmares.

THE LYING ROOM is no different. Here, our main character is Neve, a middle-aged woman and mother living an ordinary existence in London. After twenty or so years of marriage, the relationship has become a bit stale and routine. After a recent merger at work, even her job has lost its excitement, and the colleagues she has known since college are all getting older, too. Her oldest child is on the verge of leaving home, whilst the younger ones are firmly entrenched in a routine of school and homework and hanging out with friends. So is it really so surprising that Neve has a quick guilty fling with her boss, who for a moment or two makes her feel desired, and beautiful, and exciting? It would probably have all taken its course, except that one morning Neve receives a text from her lover to go and see him urgently. When she gets to his flat, she finds him dead on the floor, brutally stabbed to death.

What would you do? Call the police and confess your affair, risking your marriage, your career, the respect of your friends and children? Or leave, hide, pretend this has never happened?

Neve makes her choice, and her life will never be the same again. Like the gentle flutter of butterfly wings, her actions will have consequences and cause an avalanche of extraordinary events in her ordinary life. Slowly but inevitably, the line of dominos is tumbling, faster and faster until everything will come crashing down. It’s this gradual unravelling that creates almost unbearable tension that characterises Nicci French’s books and which always makes me come back for more. That, and the foray into the darker corners of the human psyche that make you look at your neighbours, your colleagues, your friends a bit closer, more suspiciously. Can you really be sure to recognise the psychopath in your midst?

THE LYING ROOM lived up to all my expectations and more. I devoured it. It may be a slow burner, but this small simmering fire soon consumed me and made me read frantically until late into the night. I couldn’t get enough of this book!

All in all, THE LYING ROOM was a clever, multi layered, descriptive domestic noir story that may have simmered slowly but with such tension that it really got under my skin – like only Nicci French can! With everyday details that could have been taken from my life, or yours, or the person next door’s, one decision causes an avalanche of events that will have your reading late into the night – right to its terrifying finale. A masterful psychological thriller I enjoyed immensely!

EXCERPT: ...he was lying on his back and he was dead. Somehow she'd never even known the meaning of being dead until she saw those open eyes. They weren't staring eyes. They were just things now, open and exposed. His mouth was also gaping open, as if in vast, unending surprise.

His head was framed by a pool of blood, dark red, smooth. His face looked dead, but every bit of his body looked dead as well. His arms and legs were splayed in unnatural positions. His right elbow was caught under his body, which made his hand stick up. It was as if he was half way through the process of turning over. It looked uncomfortable and Neve felt an impulse to make him comfortable, to pull the arm free, like when they had been entangled in bed together, sweating, out of breath and she helped him ease his hand from under her bare back.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: It should have been just a mid-life fling. A guilty indiscretion that Neve Connolly could have weathered. An escape from twenty years of routine marriage to her overworked husband, and from her increasingly distant children. But when Neve pays a morning-after visit to her lover, Saul, and finds him brutally murdered, their pied-à-terre still heady with her perfume, all the lies she has so painstakingly stitched together threaten to unravel.

After scrubbing clean every trace of her existence from Saul’s life—and death—Neve believes she can return to normal, shaken but intact. But she can’t get out of her head the one tormenting question: what was she forgetting?

An investigation into the slaying could provide the answer. It’s brought Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Hitching, and Neve’s worst fears, to her door. But with every new lie, every new misdirection to save herself, Neve descends further into the darkness of her betrayal—and into more danger than she ever imagined. Because Hitching isn’t the only one watching Neve. So is a determined killer who’s about to make the next terrifying move in a deadly affair…

MY THOUGHTS: I loved this book. I loved the characters, and the plot and the fact that I had absolutely no idea who killed Saul, let alone why.

The authors perceptively portray a marriage that is worn around the edges and all the problems that accompany two people who love each other but find the distance between them increasing as all the problems of day to day life seem to take precedence.

Neve is the wife, the mother, the worker, the friend who is always there for everyone. Fletcher is a struggling artist, resentful of his popular successful wife who appears to float through life quite effortlessly. And Saul is the man who sees Neve for who she really is, who sees her struggles and makes her feel alive again.

The Lying Room is about making choices, and the consequences of those choices.

This is a tautly plotted thriller, with plenty of twists, and a palpable air of tension from beginning to end. The characterisation is superb. There is not one predictable moment in this book. I loved it!

#TheLyingRoom #NetGalley

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THE AUTHORS: Nicci Gerrard was born in June 1958 in Worcestershire. After graduating with a first class honours degree in English Literature from Oxford University, she began her first job, working with emotionally disturbed children in Sheffield. In that same year she married journalist Colin Hughes.

In the early eighties she taught English Literature in Sheffield, London and Los Angeles, but moved into publishing in 1985 with the launch of Women's Review, a magazine for women on art, literature and female issues.

In 1987 Nicci had a son, Edgar, followed by a daughter, Anna, in 1988, but a year later her marriage to Colin Hughes broke down.

In 1989 she became acting literary editor at the New Statesman, before moving to the Observer, where she was deputy literary editor for five years, and then a feature writer and executive editor.

It was while she was at the New Statesman that she met Sean French.

Sean French was born in May 1959 in Bristol, to a British father and Swedish mother. He too studied English Literature at Oxford University at the same time as Nicci, also graduating with a first class degree, but their paths didn't cross until 1990. In 1981 he won Vogue magazine's Writing Talent Contest, and from 1981 to 1986 he was their theatre critic. During that time he also worked at the Sunday Times as deputy literary editor and television critic, and was the film critic for Marie Claire and deputy editor of New Society.

Sean and Nicci were married in Hackney in October 1990. Their daughters, Hadley and Molly, were born in 1991 and 1993.

By the mid-nineties Sean had had two novels published, The Imaginary Monkey and The Dreamer of Dreams, as well as numerous non-fiction books, including biographies of Jane Fonda and Brigitte Bardot.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Simon and Schuster UK via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of The Lying Room by Nicci French. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

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The Lying Room is the thirteenth stand-alone novel by British writing duo, Nicci French. Neve Connolly “was not so far off fifty. She had a husband who was more or less unemployed and on and off depressed; a job that had ground her down; financial worries. And she had a daughter who for years had turned her life inside out and upside down.”

She regards her affair with senior colleague, Saul Stevenson: “like a gulp of fresh water, reminding her that she still had a self, a sliver of life that belonged only to her”; it is a “joyful escape from the distress of her life.” She’s perhaps not proud of it, but she can’t really help herself. When she receives a text that represents an unexpected opportunity to be together, she quickly heads for their pied-a-terre. So she’s shocked to find Saul’s corpse, clearly the victim of a violent attack.

Neve has a logical reason for not calling 999: it would break her already fragile teenaged daughter Mabel, “jittery and frantic and full of rage”, to discover Neve’s infidelity to her husband of twenty years, Fletcher. Instead, she meticulously and methodically removes any trace of herself and their relationship. Well, almost. When she returns for an overlooked item, she makes a disturbing discovery.

When the murder is reported, DCI Alastair Hitching is on the case. Neve finds his gaze disturbing, and has to firmly resist the urge to tell him everything. “’Secrets,’ he ruminated, looking ahead, walking with long strides. ‘They’re dangerous things, don’t you agree?’” Trying to keep it all together, “She realised that she was already thinking like a criminal” and at every encounter with Hitching, Neve feels all will be revealed and she is about to be arrested.

The authors manage to work some deliciously dark ironies and utterly wicked twists into the plot. When it seems things can't get any worse, of course they can, and do! As the story unfolds, occasional elements of farce emerge, and sometimes things actually feel quite surreal, especially as, despite the dark goings-on, the minutiae of a life with a husband, a “stormy, ferocious” teenaged daughter, two pre-teen sons and a guinea pig, continue throughout.

Every so often, Neve succinctly summarises her current situation and as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly bizarre, although, to her surprise “Life continued in its tracks. Perhaps, she thought, it would be like a building that is demolished, holding its shape after the button is pushed, only gradually losing its outline, wavering, folding in on itself with a roar.”

This duo certainly has a way with words: as Neve tries to puzzle out who has done this, she understands that someone had “spread distrust through her like a stain.” A brilliant, blackly funny and wholly enthralling read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Australia.