The Lover

If Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell is to have proper successor, well, here she is, Laura Wilson. The story itself is a relatively simple one. Set in London under siege of the WWII Blitz from the very start we find the body of a brutally murdered woman--the fourth found in a short period of time. We then watch events unfold from the past leading up to this inevitable but terrifying act through the eyes of three people: a young fighter pilot with a disturbing secret, a prostitute with a child to support, and a young female office worker learning the ways of the world in this devastating setting. The beauty of each nerrative is how authentic each sounds as the chapters alternate from one character's point of view to another. This technique allows the reader to view events from different perspectives and provides unusual character depth, but it also builds nervy suspense as the reader becomes attached to these characters and doesn't quite know the what will happen to them. We think one of them will be killed (as shown in the beginning), but who? The intertwining nerratives also reflect the upredictable intertwining of these three lives leading up to that one tragic, inevitable murder. Laura Wilson creates an authentic, atmospheric rendering of WWII London, and its denizens struggling to survive it through the brutal events. I can't imagine what it would have been like to survive it, but the author has done that for me brilliantly.