Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Unraveling Oliver
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1967
WEBSITE: http://www.liznugent.ie/
CITY: Dublin
STATE:
COUNTRY: Ireland
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2014026532
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2014026532
HEADING: Nugent, Liz
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670 __ |a Unravelling Oliver, 2014 : |b t.p. (Liz Nugent) p. 3 of cover (has worked in Irish film, theatre and television for most of her adult life; award-winning writer of radio and television drama, has written short stories for children and adults; her first novel)
PERSONAL
Born 1967, in Dublin, Ireland; married Richard McCullough (a musician and sound engineer).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Story associate for Fair City (soap opera), 2003-13. Has also written for television programs, including The Resistors, Campus, and The Appointment and for radio programs, including Appearances. Organizer of literary salons and festivals.
AWARDS:Crime Novel of the Year, Irish Book Awards, for Unravelling Oliver; Jack Harte Bursary winner, Irish Writers Centre/Tyrone Guthrie Centre, 2014; EATC bursary and writing fellowships; Ireland Funds Monaco bursary, 2016; RTE Ryan Tubridy Show Listener’s Choice Award, Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards, 2016, and Reader’s Choice Award, Richard & Judy Spring List, 2017, both for Lying in Wait; Woman of the Year Award in Literature, Irish Tatler, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor of stories to radio programs, including Sunday Miscellany and Fiction 15.
SIDELIGHTS
Liz Nugent is an Irish writer based in Dublin. She has written for television and radio programs.
Unravelling Oliver
Nugent’s first novel is Unravelling Oliver. In this volume, she tells the story of Alice and Oliver Ryan, a middle-aged couple who work together on children’s books. Oliver is the author, and Alice illustrates. When Oliver brutally beats Alice, leaving her in a coma, those who knew them are shocked and seek clues in Oliver’s behavior and past.
Adriana Delgado, critic on the Seattle PI website, remarked: “Unraveling Oliver is appealing enough to draw the reader in, but unfortunately, it doesn’t manage to maintain much of a grip. This doesn’t mean that Oliver’s reasons for possibly being the way he is are uninteresting, but Nugent could have challenged herself further by giving her characters deeper complexity and dimension. Instead, she chose to leave them terribly jejune which is a disservice not only for the story, but also for the reader.” “The book works as a page-turner, but it’s surprising that a screenwriter couldn’t populate her book with a few more vivid characters,” asserted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. In a more favorable assessment of the book on the Medium website, Zachary Houle commented: “There’s a lot to unravel with Unraveling Oliver, much in the way of symbolism and analogy, but it also reads well as a straight-up thriller, even if we already pretty much know what the outcome of it is. This is a wild rollercoaster ride of a novel, an intricate pleasure that unveils as it sometimes simultaneously conceals, and everything is perfected plotted to maximize your enjoyment of this book.” Houle continued: “So hang onto your hats, and climb aboard a flying chair, as Unraveling Oliver is a sheer delight. It all begins with one knock-out of a sentence, one that that will absolutely floor you and keep you there.”
Kristen Donnelly, contributor to the All about Romance website, suggested: “Ms. Nugent slowly and expertly peels back the layers of this enigmatic man, revealing painful secrets, twisting lies, and a few revelations that take one’s breath away.” Donnelly added: “The reveals are universal, even if they come in Dublin accents.” Writing on the Washington Post website, Dennis Drabelle suggested that Nugent wrote in a “naturalistic” style, comparing it to that of Émile Zola. Of that style, Drabelle stated: “One risk of naturalistic storytelling is a tendency toward futility. The reader comes to believe that McTeague, Carrie and the rest couldn’t have avoided perdition. … Nugent solves that problem by making Oliver self-aware, articulate and oh-so-needy. Nugent’s other exceptional asset is her skill as a plotter. She assembles the pieces of Oliver’s past to form a rich and coherent design.” Joe Hartlaub, reviewer on Bookreporter.com, opined: “Nugent demonstrates that she is a master of quietly ratcheting up the suspense quotient as she slowly but carefully reveals all of Oliver’s secrets—including a couple he doesn’t know, at least at first—leading up to the mystery that lies at the heart of the novel: the reason Oliver so brutally attacked his wife. It is a wild ride from first page to last.” “Secrecy and sadness permeate this rich debut novel by Irish author Nugent,” asserted Henrietta Verma in Booklist. Verma also described the book as “satisfying.” A Publishers Weekly critic noted: “Nugent presents a fresh look at a man hiding his violent personality in this intense character study.”
Lying in Wait
Lydia Fitzsimmons, an unstable wife and mother, is the protagonist of Nugent’s following novel, Lying in Wait. Lydia’s husband accidentally kills a woman named Annie, and Lydia helps him hide the body. Annie’s sister, Karen, seeks answers in the disappearance. In an interview with a contributor to the Liz Loves Books blog, Nugent stated: “I don’t think there are enough bad mothers in literature. Bad fathers are plentiful but usually, the mothers are the ones picking up the pieces. I wanted to write about a bad mother, but then I thought ‘what if she is really deluded and thinks she’s a brilliant mother?’ So I began to write this horrifically damaged woman and for some reason, I found it easy to get inside her head and write from her point of view. Snobbery is hilarious and I had great fun with that aspect of her personality.”
“Lying in Wait is an ingenious and accomplished suspense novel,” asserted Declan Hughes on the Irish Times Online. Declan Burke, reviewer on the Irish Examiner Online, suggested: “A complex plot rich in subtext allows Nugent to explore female sexuality [and] the … layers of class distinction in Ireland, all of it wrapped up in an emotionally nuanced tale of betrayal, murder, and unbearable loss. It’s a novel that propels Liz Nugent to the first rank of Irish crime writing; where she goes from here will take us all on a very interesting journey.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Henrietta Verma, review of Unraveling Oliver, p. 31.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Unravelling Oliver.
Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2017, review of Unraveling Oliver, p. 42.
ONLINE
All about Romance, https://allaboutromance.com/ (September 11, 2017), Kristen Donnelly, review of Unraveling Oliver.
Bookreporter.com, https://www.bookreporter.com/ (February 6, 2018), Joe Hartlaub, review of Unraveling Oliver; (April 10, 2018), author profile.
Irish Examiner Online, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ (September 17, 2016), Declan Burke, review of Lying In Wait.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (July 9, 2016), Declan Hughes, review of Lying In Wait.
Liz Loves Books, http://lizlovesbooks.com/ (January 21, 2017), author interview.
Liz Nugent Website, http://www.liznugent.ie (April 10, 2018).
Medium, https://medium.com/ (February 7, 2017), Zachary Houle, review of Unraveling Oliver.
RTE Online, https://www.rte.ie/ (July 20, 2016), author interview.
Seattle PI Online, https://www.seattlepi.com/ (August 27, 2017), Adriana Delgado, review of Unraveling Oliver.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (September 18, 2017), Dennis Drabelle, review of Unraveling Oliver.
About Liz
Liz was born in Dublin, where she now lives with her husband, musician and sound engineer Richard McCullough.
Liz first began to write for broadcast in 2003. Between 2003 and 2013, she worked as a Story Associate on the popular television soap opera Fair City. She had several pieces accepted for Sunday Miscellany, a radio series on RTE Radio 1 specialising in nostalgic autobiographical writing.
Subsequently, she had two children’s stories accepted by the Fiction 15 series for the same broadcaster.
In 2006, her first short story for adults, Alice, was shortlisted for the Francis McManus Short Story Prize.
Liz went on to write a children’s animation series called The Resistors for TG4. Her half-hour drama, The Appointment was one of four winners chosen to be broadcast live on TG4 in the Seomra Sé series.
Liz’s radio drama, Appearances, represented Ireland at the New York Festivals in 2008.
She was the winner of an EATC bursary and writing workshops in Geneva and Berlin for pilot episode of drama series Campus in 2007.
Liz’s first novel Unravelling Oliver was published to critical and popular acclaim in Ireland in March 2014. It quickly became a firm favourite with book clubs and reader’s groups. In November of that year, it went on to win the Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and was long listed for the International Dublin Literature Prize 2016. She was also the winner of the inaugural Jack Harte Bursary provided by the Irish Writers Centre and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Dec 2014.
Her second novel, Lying in Wait, was released in July 2016. It went straight to number 1 in the Irish Bestseller lists, remaining there for nine weeks and spent eight months in the top ten.
In September 2016, liz was awarded the Ireland Funds Monaco bursary and went to Monaco for a month to write in the Princess Grace Irish library.
In November 2016, Lying in Wait won the RTE Ryan Tubridy Show Listener’s Choice Award at the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards. The book was also shortlisted in the Crime Fiction category. It has been long listed for the Dublin International Literary Award 2018.
Lying in Wait was chosen as part of the Spring 2017 list for the very prestigious Richard & Judy Book Club in the UK. In April 2017, Lying in Wait was the winner of the Reader’s Choice Award of the Richard & Judy Spring List.
Liz is absolutely thrilled that Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster USA published Unraveling Oliver in 2017 with Lying in Wait scheduled for publication in 2018. She is very pleased to be in the editorial hands of Jackie Cantor. Unraveling Oliver was chosen for the BEA Book Buzz panel at Book Expo in June 2017
Liz was honoured to win the Irish Tatler Woman of the Year award in Literature in October 2017.
Her third novel, Skin Deep is published by Penguin books in the UK and Ireland in Spring 2018
Aside from writing, Liz has led workshops in writing drama for broadcast, she has produced and managed literary salons and curated the literary strand of Skibbereen Arts Festival in July 2016.
If you’d like to contact Liz about anything, please use the form below.
Agent & Publicist Contacts
Agent: Marianne Gunn O’Connor – mgoclitagency@eircom.net
USA Scout Press (Simon and Schuster) Publicist: Meagan Harris- meagan.harris@simonandschuster.com
UK & Ireland Penguin Publicist: Cliona Lewis – cliona.lewis@penguin.ie
Contact Liz
Liz Nugent
Liz Nugent has worked in Irish film, theater, and television for most of her adult life. She is an award-winning writer of radio and television drama and has written prize-winning short stories both for children and adults. She lives in Dublin with her husband.
Liz Nugent: Lying in wait for assured follow-up hit
Updated / Wednesday, 20 Jul 2016 14:14 1
Liz Nugent’s debut novel Unravelling Oliver won the Irish Book Awards Crime Novel of the Year in 2014 and was also the biggest-selling debut novel in this country that year, a fact that Liz is still bowled over by.
She's also that rare thing in Ireland, a full-time writer of fiction. When she wrote that first novel – which famously dealt with an abusive husband – she was still working at RTÉ. She has written for radio and TV drama, including Fair City. In Lying in Wait, her newly-arrived, second crime novel, the main event as it were, occurs on page one of this gripping 300-page tale.
A respected South Dublin judge who has had serious financial problems due to his thieving accountant murders a prostitute with the help of his wife. There are surely echoes of the Scottish Play, as the wife is the Lady Macbeth-like figure who keeps calm, while the judge begins to fall apart. At stake is the family reputation, as a catastrophic family scandal would tarnish the prospects of their son and heir. A conspiracy of silence is seriously challenged, as the gardaí visit the cherished and secluded family pile to make their dogged enquiries.
"It was almost a shock that having written one book that I would then have to write another one. I didn’t think when I was writing the first book that this was going to be a career, but I was really pleased that it did so well that I was asked to write another one", said Nugent.
There had been nothing in the can, in other words? "No, but Marian Keyes says you have to go back to the well, you have to allow the well run dry and then you have to go back to the well to replenish the ideas. But you have to get a time between books to do that."
Working with such dark materials is her modus operandi now, the author readily recognises. "I was always interested in sinister characters in novels and TV. So that’s where the inspiration came from." Fictional works that have been important to her include John Banville’s The Book of Evidence, Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, Any Human Heart by William Boyd, anything by Daphne de Maurier.
"All of those dark, unsettled characters I find really interesting." As for TV, she cites Walter White in Breaking Bad as the perfect exemplar of character development. "He starts out as a boring, put-upon teacher and ends up as a drug kingpin, and I thought that transition was really fascinating."
Lying in Wait is set in the year 1980, so there is a liberal sprinkling of period detail. Rumpole of the Bailey is on the telly, and Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive and Rod Stewart are playing on the radio (Rod arguably past his prime by then, but let’s not nit-pick.)
She says she didn't feel pressure to make the book up-to-the-minute modern. "With Unravelling Oliver and with this book I’ve gone back into the past. For somebody who spends a lot of time on social media, I know it’s very absorbing but at the same time I don’t think it makes for great stories, unless you are writing like Louise O’Neill for example in Asking For It, where social media plays such a huge part in the story."
"But the characters I write I just don’t think they would get to grips with that, because they’re older and of a certain generation and of a certain class, I don’t think they would be engaged as much. There are some people who do it (social media) really well, but it’s not for me."
Ultimately, Liz Nugent hopes that her readers will find Lying in Wait just as appealing as Unravelling Oliver. "I hope they find it as readable - the people who have read it so far, seem to have read it very quickly. They’ve read it in one or two goes, so hopefully the new one will work the same way."
Lying in Wait is published in Penguin Trade paperback
QUOTED: "I don’t think there are enough bad mothers in literature. Bad fathers are plentiful but usually, the mothers are the ones picking up the pieces. I wanted to write about a bad mother, but then I thought ‘what if she is really deluded and thinks she’s a brilliant mother?’ So I began to write this horrifically damaged woman and for some reason, I found it easy to get inside her head and write from her point of view. Snobbery is hilarious and I had great fun with that aspect of her personality."
Lying in Wait – Interview with Liz Nugent.
By LizLovesBooks | January 21, 2017 | Blog Tour
Today I’m REALLY happy to welcome Liz Nugent to the blog (All the best people are called Liz you know) talking a little about Lying In Wait – a brilliant haunting novel that made it easily into my Top Ten of 2016.
So having loved Unravelling Oliver I have to say I loved Lying in Wait even more, it making my top ten this year – mostly I want to know about the creation of Lydia – SUCH a brilliant character, she drove me insane. Where did she come from?
I was thrilled to be in your top ten and am so grateful to you for all of the support since I started these book writing antics!
I don’t think there are enough bad mothers in literature. Bad fathers are plentiful but usually, the mothers are the ones picking up the pieces. I wanted to write about a bad mother, but then I thought ‘what if she is really deluded and thinks she’s a brilliant mother?’ So I began to write this horrifically damaged woman and for some reason, I found it easy to get inside her head and write from her point of view. Snobbery is hilarious and I had great fun with that aspect of her personality but I think I was probably highly influenced by other women in literature: Lady Macbeth, Medea, Mrs Danvers and Miss Havisham.
You’ve got a killer opening line that I won’t repeat here although it is in my review. How important is it do you think to draw the reader in from the very first page? Especially when it comes to psychological thrillers of which there are many and varied.
I am quite addicted to social media and I think that as a result, my attention span is now only about fifteen minutes long. And I think that’s the same for a lot of people so it’s really important to grab the reader by the throat with the very first line. It is crucial that there be a question in that line that demands an answer- the who or the why, or both. With both of my novels, I try to demonstrate what kind of character we are dealing with in that opening page and hopefully, the reader will be intrigued enough to keep going.
You concentrate in both novels on aftermath, rather than whodunit, which I find brilliantly refreshing. You kind of take your characters apart so the readers get ever more drawn into their vortex. And you’ve got a KILLER ending to Lying in Wait that still makes me randomly think about it now. How do you go about plotting and construction?
I am ok at plotting but structure is my downfall and in the case of both books, my editor played a huge role in the way the story unfolded so I must give due credit there to Patricia Deevy. The ending to Lying in Wait came at the last minute when I was up against a deadline. Without giving too much away, I knew that a certain character was going to be badly damaged but I didn’t know the extent of the damage until I went to write it. It is pretty dark. Readers have told me how shocked they were. I like to build expectations and then defy them. Har har.
Do you have a favourite character you have created? I’m actually quite fond of Oliver it has to be said. I do like the dark ones.
Yes, I must admit I have a soft spot for Oliver. I lived with him for a lot longer than any other character because I wrote Unravelling Oliver on and off over the course of about six years. When you write a character from a first person perspective, you really need to inhabit their mind and Oliver feels very real to me still. I could never condone what he did, but I understand it completely. He made some very bad decisions that led to tragedy for everyone who came close to him, and ultimately to his own downfall.
Having said that, Lydia is even more monstrous and even less sympathetic, but I understand her too. I’d quite like to visit her.
Do you have a book that you’ve read in 2016 that you would like to recommend to others? I know its hard to choose just one. I had 10 but I’m nicer to myself…
I just finished reading The Dark Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell (writing as Barbara Vine) and am giddy with excitement about it. I cannot understand why I’d never heard of it before. It is absolutely superb and stands up to anything written by Du Maurier or the Bronte sisters. Secrets and lies and damaged women and social snobbery. Right up my steet!
Can you tell us anything about what is next?
The next novel is called Skin Deep and centres on a woman who is deeply scarred, inside and out.
Thank you so much!
About the book:
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.
Read my review of Lying in Wait HERE
Find out more HERE
Follow Liz on Twitter HERE
To Purchase Lying in Wait clickety click right HERE
Find out more! Follow the Tour..
QUOTED: "The book works as a page-turner, but it's surprising that a screenwriter couldn't populate her book with a few more vivid characters."
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Print Marked Items
Nugent, Liz: UNRAVELING OLIVER
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Nugent, Liz UNRAVELING OLIVER Scout Press/Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 22 ISBN:
978-1-5011-6775-1
This psychological thriller--a debut novel by an Irish TV and radio writer--is not a whodunit but a why'dhe-do-it.In
a seemingly random burst of violence, Oliver Ryan--a children's author with an enviable career
and a stable home life--assaults his wife, Alice, during dinner, nearly fatally. Oliver calmly relates his crime
in the opening chapter, and then his back story is related by various people in his life, including his halfestranged
brother, Philip; Barney, the childhood friend who secretly loves Alice; Michael, the brother of
Oliver's now-dead girlfriend, Laura; Moya, the actress neighbor with whom Oliver had an affair; Eugene,
Alice's mentally disabled brother; and Veronique, who employed Oliver during a fateful summer when he
moved from Ireland to France. The story keeps returning to Oliver's relationship with his father, who
banished his son from his life because of his illegitimate birth; and to that French trip, which scarred Oliver
for reasons that aren't immediately apparent. While Oliver's story becomes more tragic with each flashback,
the reasons for the violent outburst don't become clear until the very end. Despite all the different narrators,
the voice doesn't change much except in Eugene's chapter, and because Alice doesn't speak, her relationship
with Oliver feels underdeveloped. Though some of the scenes feel at first like digressions, the pieces all
wind up fitting together. Unfortunately, the story's big revelation hinges on two characters meeting in a notquite-plausible
way and a piece of information that one of them just happens to blurt out. The book works
as a page-turner, but it's surprising that a screenwriter couldn't populate her book with a few more vivid
characters.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Nugent, Liz: UNRAVELING OLIVER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495428011/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2675e5d8.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495428011
QUOTED: "Secrecy and sadness permeate this rich debut novel by Irish author Nugent."
"satisfying."
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Unraveling Oliver
Henrietta Verma
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p31.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Unraveling Oliver.
By Liz Nugent.
Aug. 2017. 272p. Simon & Schuster/Scout, $26 (9781501181474); e-book, 511.99 (9781501167768).
Secrecy and sadness permeate this rich debut novel by Irish author Nugent, an award-winning radio and TV
writer. Named Crime Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the tale centers on the mysterious,
lonely Oliver, an Irish boy and then man who is scarred by his father's rejection and visits that same
rejection on all around him. Chapters that are narrated in turns by Oliver, his wife, friends who
accompanied Oliver on a fateful working vacation in France when he was a teen, and a member of the
French family that became his fixation. This is a successful device, as it allows a puzzle involving the trip to
come slowly into view as readers are skillfully given glimpses of events and of the resulting devastation that
Oliver so nonchalantly metes out. Catholic-clergy dysfunction and its effects on families feature strongly
here, making the thriller a satisfying read-alike for John Boyne's A History of Loneliness (2015).--Henrietta
Verma
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Verma, Henrietta. "Unraveling Oliver." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 31. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862745/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4d6c2e8b.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862745
QUOTED: "Nugent presents a fresh look at a man hiding his violent personality in this
intense character study."
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Unraveling Oliver
Publishers Weekly.
264.24 (June 12, 2017): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Unraveling Oliver
Liz Nugent. Scout, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-1-5011-6775-1
The unfathomable motive behind a seemingly unprovoked attack by children's book author Oliver Ryan on
his wife, Alice, drives Irish author Nugent's outstanding first novel. To most people, the handsome,
charismatic Oliver and the plain, shy Alice appeared to have had a decent marriage for more than 20 years.
The relationship was enhanced by Alice being the illustrator for Oliver's world-renowned kids novels.
Despite Oliver's frequent affairs, he was discreet and the couple enjoyed a comfortable life in Dublin. The
narrative alternates between those who knew Oliver and Alice at different times. Family members, friends,
and acquaintances seek some clue to what caused Oliver's brutality as Alice languishes in a coma. Even
Oliver seems amazed at his actions because he was "fond of her, in my way," and appreciative that Alice
made no demands on him. The tension subtly rises as Oliver's past unravels, revealing a loveless childhood
rooted in religious hypocrisy. Nugent presents a fresh look at a man hiding his violent personality in this
intense character study, which won the Irish Book Award's Crime Novel of the Year. Agent: Marianne Gunti
O'Connor, Marianne Gunn O'Connor Creative Agency. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Unraveling Oliver." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 42. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720656/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a7394ddf.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720656
QUOTED: "Nugent demonstrates that she is a master of quietly ratcheting up the suspense quotient as she slowly but carefully reveals all of Oliver’s secrets—including a couple he doesn’t know, at least at first—leading up to the mystery that lies at the heart of the novel: the reason Oliver so brutally attacked his wife. It is a wild ride from first page to last."
Review
Unraveling Oliver
by Liz Nugent
Buy this book at IndieBound
Buy this book at Amazon
Buy this book at Barnes and Noble
UNRAVELING OLIVER was published in 2014 in debut author Liz Nugent’s native Ireland, but is only now appearing in the United States. The reputation of both Nugent and the book precede them, given that her work was named “Crime Novel of the Year” by the Irish Book Awards. This is understandable, and the level of those accolades should almost certainly be attained here as well. One senses from the first words that the book is a winner, and it gradually becomes clear just how striking it is. It puts a new spin on the concept of the unreliable narrator while tinkering with the basic foundation of the contemporary novel, all with grand purpose and even greater results.
It is understandable if, from the first page, Oliver Ryan puts the reader in the mind of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. Indeed, Oliver gets the chance to make a first impression before anyone else, and doesn’t make the most of that or subsequent opportunities. While other characters are given their own chapters to narrate their versions of encounters and histories with Oliver, it is Oliver who does himself the most damage. One would reflexively reach for the term “clueless” in describing him, but it goes much deeper than that. He has no insight at all, a personality factor that in Nugent’s extremely talented hands implicitly yields even more information.
"One senses from the first words that the book is a winner, and it gradually becomes clear just how striking it is. It puts a new spin on the concept of the unreliable narrator while tinkering with the basic foundation of the contemporary novel, all with grand purpose and even greater results."
Each chapter is narrated in the first person but by a different character. Some are told by Oliver himself. He begins by describing a brutal attack upon his wife, Alice. We don’t learn what precipitated this --- at least not immediately --- but what is revealed is that Oliver is a very successful author of children’s books under the name “Vincent Dax” and Alice illustrates his work. We also are told that there is a wooden box in Oliver’s possession that is quite important to him. Ultimately we learn its contents, though that knowledge is parceled out in exquisitely parsimonious fashion.
Other chapters are narrated by Oliver’s acquaintances, past and present. They include (but are not limited to) Barney, who was dating Alice until Oliver swept her off her feet and carried her off; Michael, Oliver’s friend from school who managed to escape his orbit, all for the better; and Veronique, a French vineyard owner who employed Oliver for a summer during his college years, the summer when their lives were changed irrevocably.
Nugent demonstrates that she is a master of quietly ratcheting up the suspense quotient as she slowly but carefully reveals all of Oliver’s secrets --- including a couple he doesn’t know, at least at first --- leading up to the mystery that lies at the heart of the novel: the reason Oliver so brutally attacked his wife. It is a wild ride from first page to last, demonstrating how the sins of one generation can result in the far-reaching destruction of the next. Even more remarkably, Nugent, without apparent strain, manages to conclude the book with a happy ending, if bittersweetly so. At least two characters, the most innocent of the lot, get what they want, and it’s indirectly because of Oliver.
UNRAVELING OLIVER is a riveting work that reads as if it was written by an author who has several books under his or her belt, which is a shame, because I happily would have hunted down everything on Nugent’s backlist and read it. She has published shorter fiction, which I eagerly will seek out and read while awaiting her next book. You should as well.
Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on August 25, 2017
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Unraveling Oliver
by Liz Nugent
Publication Date: February 6, 2018
Genres: Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press
ISBN-10: 1501173383
ISBN-13: 9781501173387
QUOTED: "One risk of naturalistic storytelling is a tendency toward futility. The reader comes to believe that McTeague, Carrie and the rest couldn’t have avoided perdition. ... Nugent solves that problem by making Oliver self-aware, articulate and oh-so-needy. Nugent’s other exceptional asset is her skill as a plotter. She assembles the pieces of Oliver’s past to form a rich and coherent design."
Books
A middle-aged children’s book writer who comes undone
By Dennis Drabelle September 18, 2017
Oliver Ryan — he who is about to be unraveled in Liz Nugent’s fine first novel, “Unraveling Oliver” — is a middle-aged writer whose series of children’s books has earned him an international following and a fortune. But he has hardly walked onstage when we learn that he has beaten his wife into a coma from which she may never wake up. Set in Ireland, the novel consists of first-person monologues by Oliver and several other characters which serve to explain how he could have done such a heinous thing.
“Unraveling Oliver,” by Liz Nugent (Scout Press)
We discover that Oliver wasn’t just poor as a child; he was poor and shabbily dressed at a rich kids’ boarding school, sent there because his father wanted to see as little of the boy as possible. Unfortunately, Oliver could see him. The school wasn’t far from the family house, which Oliver could bring into focus through a pair of binoculars and watch as the attention he craved was lavished on his younger half brother. Not surprisingly, Oliver grew an emotional carapace; in a nice phrase, he admits that none of the women he dated as a young man tugged at his “alleged heartstrings.” What’s behind his father’s cruelty provides one of the mysteries that Nugent teases out in this highly entertaining and aesthetically satisfying novel — a book that stretches the limits of crime fiction.
[‘Women Crime Writers’ review: Well-known and unfairly forgotten favorites]
The story is told by multiple narrators, who repeatedly home in on a fraught collegiate summer when Oliver, a male friend and the friend’s sister went to France to work as field hands at a family-owned winery. The aging proprietor happened to be working on his memoirs, and since the family had saved the lives of several Jews by hiding them during World War II, he had plenty to tell. Oliver, being more proficient in French than any other worker, was brought in from the fields to help with the writing. The promotion gave him needed recognition as well as contact with the patron’s lovable 6-year-old grandson. As the odd trio spent more and more time together, Oliver warmed to this substitute for the family life he’d never had — until a nightmarish event brought everything crashing down.
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The author Liz Nugent (Beta Bajgartova)
“Unraveling Oliver” harks back to naturalism, the 19th-century literary movement that drew upon the zeitgeist (evolutionary science, determinism) and the nascent discipline of psychology to depict men and women — especially from the working class — as playthings of heredity and environment. In Europe, the movement’s doyen was Émile Zola with his Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels. In the United States, the practitioners included Frank Norris (“McTeague”), Stephen Crane (“Maggie: A Girl of the Streets”) and Theodore Dreiser (“Sister Carrie”). One risk of naturalistic storytelling is a tendency toward futility. The reader comes to believe that McTeague, Carrie and the rest couldn’t have avoided perdition even if they’d spotted it lying spread-eagle in their paths. Nugent solves that problem by making Oliver self-aware, articulate and oh-so-needy.
Nugent’s other exceptional asset is her skill as a plotter. She assembles the pieces of Oliver’s past to form a rich and coherent design. When Philip, the half brother, reflects on the puzzle of Oliver’s banishment, for example, he only deepens the mystery. “My mother insists she would have raised Oliver as her own son if Dad had let her. Mum says it was the only thing that caused heartache in their marriage. It was simply a part of my father’s life that he refused to acknowledge or discuss. She says he passionately and irrationally hated the boy, and she never knew why.” The reader will soon find out exactly why.
Dennis Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World.
UNRAVELING OLIVER
By Liz Nugent
Scout. 260 pp. $26
QUOTED: "Ms. Nugent slowly and expertly peels back the layers of this enigmatic man, revealing painful secrets, twisting lies, and a few revelations that take one’s breath away."
"The reveals are universal, even if they come in Dublin accents."
Desert Isle Keeper
Unraveling Oliver
Liz Nugent
Buy This Book
I have been harping on about this book for months, so if you’ve not been subject to my evangelical zeal about its brilliance, allow me to quickly summarize. Everyone who knows Oliver Ryan is shocked when he beats his wife to the point of a coma. This mild-mannered children’s author who lives in a leafy (read: posh) neighborhood of Dublin is the last person any of them would suspect is capable of such a thing… or is he? With each chapter told from the PoV of a different person in Oliver’s life, Ms. Nugent slowly and expertly peels back the layers of this enigmatic man, revealing painful secrets, twisting lies, and a few revelations that take one’s breath away.
Oliver Ryan – under the pseudonym Vincent Jax – is a world famous children’s author. His tales of a young prince have taken the world by storm, spawning both movie and theater franchises; one gets the impression of intentional allusions to Harry Potter as the series is described. His quiet wife, Alice, illustrates the novels for him and appears content to live in his shadow. She was raised with a mentally handicapped brother for whom she and her mother were full-time carers. This shaped her contentment and also her fascination with Oliver. While we never get to hear her voice, we certainly get her story.
As we slowly meet people who intersected with them at different seasons, we discover the Ryans’ existence is built on carefully kept secrets. Barney, the man who loved and still loves Alice, Moya, the woman with whom Oliver had a tempestuous affair, Laura, the fellow student who died after their summer working at a French vineyard; all of these voices and so many more hold the keys to truth.
As is the case with every suspense novel, reviews are difficult. I want to entice you to read Unraveling Oliver, to let you know what kind of journey you’ll be on, while at the same time revealing nothing. I’ve read this book twice now – once following its Irish release in 2014 and once on its American from this August – and I was impressed by the craftsmanship of this mystery both times. The main mystery – how Oliver could do such a thing to his wife – is solved multiple times, for the truths of people’s pasts are rarely easily revealed. This novel won awards in Ireland – a country which adores crime and suspense novels – for a reason.
There are no trigger warnings here, but there may be some cultural bits or bobs that American readers may not be familiar with. If you run into a phrase or idea that sounds foreign, just keep reading. The reveals are universal, even if they come in Dublin accents.
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Book Details
Reviewer: Kristen Donnelly
Review Date: September 11, 2017
Publication Date: 08/2017
Grade: A
Sensuality N/A
Book Type: Mystery
Review Tags:
QUOTED: "There’s a lot to unravel with Unraveling Oliver, much in the way of symbolism and analogy, but it also reads well as a straight-up thriller, even if we already pretty much know what the outcome of it is. This is a wild rollercoaster ride of a novel, an intricate pleasure that unveils as it sometimes simultaneously conceals, and everything is perfected plotted to maximize your enjoyment of this book."
"So hang onto your hats, and climb aboard a flying chair, as Unraveling Oliver is a sheer delight. It all begins with one knock-out of a sentence, one that that will absolutely floor you and keep you there."
Zachary Houle
Book critic, Fiction author, Poet, Writer, Editor. Follow me on Twitter @zachary_houle.
Feb 7
Liz Nugent
A Review of Liz Nugent’s “Unraveling Oliver”
Daddy Issues
“Unraveling Oliver” Book Cover
You have pretty big cojones as a womanly writer when the first sentence of your novel, written from a male’s perspective, goes something like this: “I expected more of a reaction the first time I hit her.” And so begins Liz Nugent’s terrific novel Unraveling Oliver. It was originally published in Ireland in 2014, but has only now made its way to Canada. It is a dizzying psychological thriller, told from various character viewpoints (a little like Rashomon), about a successful children’s author named Oliver Ryan (who writes under the pen name Vincent Dax) who beats his illustrator wife Alice one evening to the point where she is sent into a coma. The book looks back on how someone of such prestige and respect could be harbouring the traits of a sociopath.
Unraveling Oliver, then, is all backstory, going back decades to recount how Oliver came to be a wife beater. As an indictment against spousal abuse, the novel excels. We may be mortified by Oliver’s actions, but — as much as he may be a monster — he is presented as being flawed and human. To that end, he’s an interesting and even a somewhat likable and charming character — at least at first. You may not exactly be rooting for him, but you’ll come to understand why he is the way he is. And a lot of it has to do with having a father that essentially disowned him from birth. This volume, then, is a look at the relationship between the sexes viewed through the lens of paternal support or the lack thereof. But is it a riveting page-turner? You bet!
What makes this novel stand out is the fact that the multiple viewpoint angle is extremely well-done, with each character having their distinctive voice that sets them apart from the others. You have Barney, who was Alice’s poverty-row boyfriend until Oliver spirited her away. You have Michael, a gay man who had designs on Oliver at a young age and whose sister Laura is also madly in love with Oliver. You even have the perspective of Eugene, Alice’s mentally disabled brother. Each of them tells their side of the tale, which slowly unravels like an orange being peeled. The only voice that is absent is the victim’s, but that’s, alas, to be expected.
The novel whizzes along to its already-known conclusion, and the psychology of Oliver’s character begins to be revealed. Having had no parental contact or affection from a young age, Oliver turns into a cheating womanizer, and much, much worse. One is hesitant about saying too much about this novel as it may give away salient plot points. This book is best for the ignorant. The less you know, the more likely you are to be surprised and amazed at the outcome of the story.
Unraveling Oliver has won its share of acclaim already in its Irish homeland. It has won the Irish Book Award for Best Crime Novel, and has since gone on to be translated into eight languages (and I would suspect that more are on the horizon, based on the quality of the tale). As much as it is a book that has earned its share of laurels, it also is a novel about the writer’s craft — how much suffering goes into forming a perfect sentence, what constitutes as theft or plagiarism, and what sort of lives public personas (that is, successful writers) are expected to lead.
There are few faults to pick at with Unraveling Oliver. However, there is a gaping plot hole of sorts towards the book’s conclusion where one character doesn’t recognize Oliver’s work as potentially belonging to someone else. The plot hole comes from the fact that Oliver’s children's novels have been adapted into Hollywood films and stage musicals. Surely, this person would have stumbled upon the work and recognized the possible deceit earlier in the plot’s timeline. It’d be like encountering someone who hasn’t at least heard of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. This I found to be slightly unbelievable. There’s little explanation for this other than the character is childless and has no interest in children’s literature. But surely this person would have encountered a movie poster.
The children’s stories element, though, is quite fantastic, both in the literal and figurative sense. I’m sort of hoping that someone writes the children’s books that Oliver Ryan as Vincent Dax put to paper as they sound absolutely marvelous. There’s a little bit of Jonathan Carroll-esque surrealism to their plots, and — had Unraveling Oliver had any speculative fiction elements to it aside from this — I’d say that the novel feels a lot like Carroll’s: refined and elegant in its choice of images and words.
All in all, Unraveling Oliver is a marvelous work of psychological suspense. There is enough tragedy and nail biting to keep readers glued to their seats beyond what we initially know about the double life of Oliver Ryan. It may tackle the unsavoury subject of spousal abuse (and more), but it is a delight to read to figure out just what makes Ryan tick. That so much enjoyment and entertainment can come from watching the spectacle of a celebrity crash and burn is probably apropos for this season of life, perhaps even more so than when the novel first appeared in Ireland four years ago.
There’s a lot to unravel with Unraveling Oliver, much in the way of symbolism and analogy, but it also reads well as a straight-up thriller, even if we already pretty much know what the outcome of it is. This is a wild rollercoaster ride of a novel, an intricate pleasure that unveils as it sometimes simultaneously conceals, and everything is perfected plotted to maximize your enjoyment of this book. So hang onto your hats, and climb aboard a flying chair, as Unraveling Oliver is a sheer delight. It all begins with one knock-out of a sentence, one that that will absolutely floor you and keep you there until the book cover closes for the final time.
Liz Nugent’s Unraveling Oliver was published by Simon and Schuster Canada on February 6, 2018.
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QUOTED: "Unraveling Oliver is appealing enough to draw the reader in, but unfortunately, it doesn't manage to maintain much of a grip. This doesn't mean that Oliver's reasons for possibly being the way he is are uninteresting, but Nugent could have challenged herself further by giving her characters deeper complexity and dimension. Instead, she chose to leave them terribly jejune which is a disservice not only for the story, but also for the reader."
Book Review: 'Unraveling Oliver' by Liz Nugent
By Adriana Delgado, BLOGCRITICS.ORG Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, August 27, 2017
Unraveling Oliver, Liz Nugent's debut novel, begins with quite a stopper when the novel's main character Oliver Ryan states without much ceremony in the opening paragraph: "I expected more of a reaction when I hit her. She just lay on the floor holding her jaw. Staring at me. Silent. She didn't even seem to be surprised."
He speaks about the violence towards his wife Alice, with a mixture of cold detachment and oddly placed affection, which leaves little doubt about his possible sociopathy. If we were in any way uncertain of this, Oliver convinces us when he goes out for a cigarette to supposedly collect himself, and upon returning home, hits the already badly bruised Alice repeatedly and with such violence that she is left with irreparable brain damage
It's a packs-a-punch way to begin any novel and achieves the desired effect. Now we can't put Nugent's novel down, we must know what lead to this moment, what could possibly have provoked this vicious attack from a man who allegedly loved his wife. Oliver does try to explain his side, admitting that Alice had uncovered his "darkest secrets" and that she intended to "ruin" him. Needless to say, the explanation for the attack falls flat and gains no sympathy, at least from this reader, but nevertheless the need for my curiosity to be fulfilled is relentless.
Nugent's narrative is a mishmash of different POVs, from Oliver to his mistress, to his half-brother, his former best friend, Alice's ex-fiancé and so on. The many voices here do become a bit much and the change of narrator rapidly obnoxious. But the secret Oliver is keeping (as it turns out he has many more that Alice never knew about) becomes alluring enough to invest in Nugent's story, although it's truly not revealed until the final chapters.
The problem lies also with an almost too-simple narrative from most of the characters. Oliver comes across as less of a disturbed, complex psycho and more of a spoiled, vain and snooty man-child. Evidently, a father who refused to acknowledge his existence and kept him hidden in an obscure Catholic school are surely catalysts for his coldness. However, Oliver's observations are often-times simplistic and plain, not giving the reader much of a reason to be either in awe or horror of his actions.
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The other characters are equally lacking in either depth or substance, not giving us much more than a bird's eye view into their relationship with Oliver and how he deliberately or not, ruined their lives. By the end of it, all the sympathy lies with Alice, both because of the violence done to her and the fact that her own POV before the assault is sorely missing. A voice that should have been as important as Oliver's in the story is simply and tragically ignored.
As the story goes back and forth between the characters, our interest begins to wane. It's certainly not expected that Nugent give us Süskind's Jean-Baptiste Grenouille or Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, but Unraveling Oliver could have benefited from a more thorough exploration into a disturbed mind in lieu of POV's that didn't add anything substantial to the story. Oliver's mistress Moya for instance, is certainly not an engaging enough character to retain our attention through multiple chapters, and although perhaps a few of her reveals are important, they certainly didn't require as much of a spotlight.
Unraveling Oliver is appealing enough to draw the reader in, but unfortunately, it doesn't manage to maintain much of a grip. This doesn't mean that Oliver's reasons for possibly being the way he is are uninteresting, but Nugent could have challenged herself further by giving her characters deeper complexity and dimension. Instead, she chose to leave them terribly jejune which is a disservice not only for the story, but also for the reader.
The post Book Review: 'Unraveling Oliver' by Liz Nugent appeared first on Blogcritics.
View the original article on blogcritics.org
QUOTED: "A complex plot rich in subtext allows Nugent to explore female sexuality [and] the ... layers of class distinction in Ireland, all of it wrapped up in an emotionally nuanced tale of betrayal, murder, and unbearable loss. It’s a novel that propels Liz Nugent to the first rank of Irish crime writing; where she goes from here will take us all on a very interesting journey."
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Book review: Lying in Wait
118
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Review: Declan Burke
LIZ NUGENT’s second novel opens with a shockingly provocative line: ‘My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it.’
Liz Nugent
Penguin Ireland €16.99.
The speaker is the reclusive Lydia Fitzsimons; her husband, Andrew, is a respected Dublin judge. We quickly learn that Lydia, unable to have more children after the birth of her son Laurence, persuaded a reluctant Andrew to father a child with Annie.
When Annie — a troubled teenager with addiction issues — first lies to Andrew about being pregnant, and then tries to blackmail him, the tragedy of the novel’s first line ensues.
It’s an intriguing set-up, but Nugent, who employed multiple narrative voices in her award-winning debut Unravelling Oliver, again deploys conflicting perspectives in Lying in Wait.
We hear from Laurence Fitzsimons, an overweight and bullied teen who becomes obsessed with the missing Annie Doyle, particularly when he realises that his father is lying about his whereabouts on the night Annie Doyle disappeared.
Meanwhile, Karen Doyle, Annie’s younger sister, refuses to believe that Annie would simply run away.
Determined though she is to get to the truth of Annie’s disappearance, there is very little Karen can do when the Garda detectives investigating the case wash their hands of the trouble-making Annie.
The interwoven strands of Lydia, Laurence, and Karen’s stories set all three on a collision course in this absorbing psychological thriller.
Set in the 1980s, it’s more of a ‘whydunnit’ than a ‘whodunnit’, as Nugent, having initially established Lydia Fitzsimons as a pitiless sociopath, reveals the reasons why Lydia became a controlling, lethal monster.
Unravelling Oliver was a brave novel in the way it gradually allowed for an understanding of why and how Oliver became a vicious domestic abuser.
Similarly, Lying in Wait delves deep into the childhood of Lydia Fitzsimons to explore the extent to which she is a victim of circumstance, and how her young mind was poisoned by events over which she had no control.
Indeed, one of the most striking ‘characters’ in the novel isn’t a person but Avalon, the stately mansion in south Co Dublin that formed such an integral part of Lydia’s childhood, a house with much in common with Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley from the novel Rebecca.
A brooding presence at the heart of the story, Avalon represents an idealised childhood for Lydia, but it also hides secrets of Lydia at her worst, a bricks-and-mortar manifestation of her malevolent personality that in turn exerts a malign gravity on Lydia’s motivations.
Throughout the novel Lydia presides over her ramshackle, gloomy palace like some deranged wicked queen from an old fairytale, the gothic iconography emphasising the ever-darker twists of the tale as she plots and schemes against what appears to be an inevitable meeting of minds between her son Laurence and Annie Doyle’s sister Karen.
Lying in Wait may be set in the 1980s, but it’s a story that feels rooted in a form hundreds of years old, and has all the elements of a precautionary fable found in the classic folktales of Charles Perrault et al.
Liz Nugent’s winning of the Best Crime category at the Irish Book Awards for her debut novel was an impressive achievement, but Lying in Wait is an even more assured affair than Unravelling Oliver.
A complex plot rich in subtext allows Nugent to explore female sexuality, the roots of childhood psychosis, and the unacknowledged but very real layers of class distinction in Ireland, all of it wrapped up in an emotionally nuanced tale of betrayal, murder, and unbearable loss.
It’s a novel that propels Liz Nugent to the first rank of Irish crime writing; where she goes from here will take us all on a very interesting journey.
© Irish Examiner Ltd. All rights reserved
QUOTED: "Lying in Wait is an ingenious and accomplished suspense novel."
Crime fiction: Deliriously unpleasant characters and devilish plots
Reviews: ‘The Darkest Secret’, ‘Lying in Wait’, ‘So Say the Fallen’, ‘Charcoal Joe’ and ‘Before the Fall’
Sat, Jul 9, 2016, 01:58
Liz Nugent: her ingenious suspense novel is redolent of Highsmith and Du Maurier. Photograph: Aidan Crawley
Liz Nugent: her ingenious suspense novel is redolent of Highsmith and Du Maurier. Photograph: Aidan Crawley
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In a persuasive essay in the Atlantic this month, Terrence Rafferty suggests that the reason women are increasingly writing the most compelling crime fiction might be because they “don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times”.
Heroes are certainly thin on the ground in The Darkest Secret (Sphere, £7.99), Alex Marwood’s enthralling new novel. The book begins with a series of witness statements taken after a three-year-old girl, Coco Jackson, has apparently been snatched from a drunken weekend party.
Ten years later, Coco’s father, millionaire builder Sean Jackson, dies suddenly and as Coco’s surviving twin, Ruby, and her half-sister Milly make their way to his funeral, they begin to discover that the official version of Coco’s disappearance is a lie.
Cutting expertly from past to present among a cast of deliriously unpleasant characters, Marwood’s devilishly plotted tale arrives at an unexpectedly moving, human climax before its utterly devastating epilogue.
Marwood writes wittily about the monstrous Sean Jackson, whose speciality is stripping distinctive old houses of their antiquity and making them “horribly, painfully perfect”. He fills them with furniture, “things with no handles, things with no frills; the sorts of characterless, expensive things the newly minted, still unsure of their taste, like to buy in shops they know are safe”. Noticing a roll of fat on the small of his daughter’s back, “Sean doesn’t approve of women who don’t look after themselves. It’s the least they can do, frankly.” As much a black comedy of contemporary bad manners as psychological thriller, The Darkest Secret is a triumph and a treat.
As we learned in Unravelling Oliver, Liz Nugent doesn’t much believe in heroes either. She also has quite a way with a memorable opening line: “My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it” is how Lydia Fitzsimons begins Nugent’s absorbing new novel, Lying in Wait (Penguin, £12.99). Lydia, whose desiccated south Dublin gentility barely conceals her delirious instability, shares the narrative with her son, Laurence, and Annie’s sister, Karen.
Once she has finished the girl off with a blow from a Krooklok, Lydia takes charge. The Fitszsimons family lives in Avalon, Lydia’s ancestral home; their large rear garden is not overlooked, and Lydia knows “exactly the spot she could be buried”: on the site of an ornamental pond which Daddy had filled in after Lydia’s sister’s death in childhood.
With Karen determined to find out what happened to Annie, and Laurence convinced his father is up to no good, the skeletons emerge from their closets with pleasing regularity. Nugent moves the action surefootedly across location and social class; her prose is fluent and propulsive, her characters are complex and credible. Redolent of Highsmith and Du Maurier, and with a distinct nod to Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, Lying in Wait is an ingenious and accomplished suspense novel whose ending is as bleak as anything I’ve read this year.
Stuart Neville’s So Say the Fallen (Harvill Secker, £12.99) sees the return of DCI Serena Flanagan, whose debut outing, Those We Left Behind, was one of 2015’s outstanding titles. With her marriage under strain and her children unhappy, police work is Flanagan’s only solace. Under political pressure to sign off on the apparent suicide of a disabled local car dealer, Flanagan notes the unusual position of family photographs at the otherwise clean crime scene and the widow’s close relationship with the local rector, Rev Peter McKay, and elects to continue her investigation, a decision that will ultimately put her in mortal danger.
Cutting between Flanagan and McKay, So Say the Fallen is haunted by fearfulness, anxiety and regret. Of uncertain faith, Flanagan finds herself praying, and turns to McKay for advice. Unbeknownst to her, McKay has lost his faith entirely, and loathes himself for going through the motions, “as much out of pity for his parishioners as a desire to keep his job”.
Meticulous in its depiction of a ruthless, deeply disturbed and manipulative killer, Neville has given us a thoughtful, atmospheric novel and, in Flanagan, a low-key, all-too-human hero for our times.
“That night I sautéed hot Italian sausage with brown mushrooms, minced garlic, stewed tomatoes, fresh basil leaves, dried oregano and scallion greens.” It could only be Easy Rawlins, back for the 13th time in Charcoal Joe (Weidenfield & Nicolson, £19.99) and as engaging as ever.
Sustaining a successful series is a balancing act between the new and the familiar, and Walter Mosley is a master of the art. Charcoal Joe delivers a plot of Chandlerian complexity, with enough gunmen and femmes fatales to satisfy the most demanding noir connoisseur, but the real joys of Easy lie elsewhere: in the food, the sex, the potions from Mama Joe, the supporting cast (Jackson Blue, Feather, Fearless Jones, Mouse – Mouse!), and in lines such as “The sentinel was sitting in shadow but I knew where he was by the now-and-then glow of his cigarette”.
Before the Fall (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99), Noah Howley’s fourth novel, begins with a private plane on a runway in Martha’s Vineyard. The flight will last 16 minutes before crashing in the ocean. Of the 11 passengers, only two will survive: Scott Burroughs, a burnt-out artist in recovery, and JJ, the four-year-old son of David Bateman, who ran a Fox News-style cable network called ALC and whose aircraft it was.
Burroughs swims to shore with JJ on his shoulders and becomes an instant and reluctant hero. But Bill Milligan, a Glenn Beck-style ranter at ALC, thinks Burroughs is a phoney and a sleazebag and maybe even a murderer, and he says so, loudly and repeatedly, on television – and soon, the FBI starts to agree.
Before the Fall has a suspenseful plot, and you certainly turn the pages to find out what happens next, but it is as a Bonfire of the Vanities-style novel of the zeitgeist that it excels. The toxic nexus between media and celebrity and the grotesque wealth of the 1 per cent are among Howley’s subjects, and he captures them with scalpel-sharp accuracy and dry wit. (A banker has a separate wine fridge in his kitchen with “fifteen bottles of champagne on ice at all times, in case a New Year’s Eve party broke out unexpectedly”.)
Above all, it’s the story of Burroughs, of a broken man’s search for some kind of redemption. Before the Fall is an absolutely mesmerising book; I found myself reading it while walking down the street because I couldn’t bear to be parted from it.
Declan Hughes’s latest novel is All the Things You Are