It comes awkwardly, casting Shaw’s wife in an especially strange light. There’s a long wait for a break in the case. Shaw was driven “by the purest, most painful love”? Abbott guides us skillfully through Lizzie’s hothouse fantasies, but at the expense of action. After all, thinks Lizzie, doesn’t she have her own huge crush on Mr. Abbott’s spin on the situation is what’s important: the possibility that Evie, a willing conspirator, wanted this attention from an older man. (The location is Anyplace, U.S.A.) The crime element is handled perfunctorily. Shaw, a married middle-aged insurance agent, who has driven Evie away. It doesn’t take long to figure out that it’s Mr. Lizzie recalls that Evie had a secret admirer, an older man who would watch her at night, standing in the yard. She has the feeling something momentous is coming, and then it does: Evie disappears. Lizzie’s own dad has split after an ugly divorce. Verver, the most fun dad you could imagine. Aside from Evie, there is her older sister Dusty, impossibly beautiful and glamorous, and Mr. Lizzie, the narrator, is fascinated by the Ververs. The 13-year-olds are on the cusp of puberty, and all the revelations it will bring. Next-door neighbors, they are tomboys who think nothing of getting banged up in a hockey game. Edgar Award–winning crime writer Abbott’s sixth novel ( Bury Me Deep, 2009, etc.) is a change of pace: a delicate skein of fantasies and obsessions, shared by two adolescent girls and shadowed by an abduction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |