One of the most resilient tropes of the modern domestic psycho-thriller is the bland suburban community where something goes terribly, terribly wrong. This is bread-and-butter for Shari Lapena, and she introduces us to the manicured lawns and domestic harmony of Stanhope, a small town where, at opposite ends of Connaught Street, live Dr. William Wooler and Nora Blanchard. They are both married, with children, but they have been having an affair. When Nora ends it, abruptly, at their regular tryst in a seedy motel, William drives home distraught, only to find his nine year-old daughter Avery in the house. She has been sent home from school after yet another outburst of disruptive behaviour. Avery is the very last person William wants to see, and they fight.
Avery Wooler is, frankly, a junior monster. She has all manner of letters after her name. Think of a syndrome, and she has it. She disrupts other little girls’ birthday parties because she can’t open the presents first. She drives her mum and dad to distraction and, in her father’s case – violence. On this afternoon. Avery greets her dad with her usual insouciance and he snaps, giving her a slap round the face. After making sure that no serious damage has been done, Wooler – his mind a turmoil of rejection and anger – storms out of the house. Or does he?
When the rest of Wooler’s family – wife Erin and son Michael – arrive home, Avery is nowhere to be found. Eventually, the police are alerted, the panic button is hit, and a huge search ensues. The prescience of the book’s title becomes ever more apparent as – one house at a time – the families who live on Connaught Street are sucked into the mystery. The cops leading the hunt for Avery Wooler – officers Bledsoe and Gully – follow one false lead after another, not because they are particularly dim, but rather because they simply don’t have a physical trace of Avery. At the back of their minds is the awful truth that in child abduction cases, if the victim isn’t found alive within the first few hours, then it becomes a hunt for a body.
Shari Lapena describes in grim detail the psychological disintegration of the families involved, the Woolers and the Blanchards, but about two thirds of the way through she lets us know what actually happened to Avery so – in one sense – our suspense and stress are relieved, but our x-ray view of what is going on behind inside the walls of the houses on Connaught Street still allows for a few shocks. In my review of one of Shari Lapena’s earlier novels (click the link below) I used the term Anxiety Porn, and that’s what the Canadian novelist does really well.
Lapena’s speciality is describing how unfortunate events can tug away at domestic security like a loose thread being insistently pulled from a much-loved cardigan, with the result that the cosy garment disintegrates and becomes unwearable. Everyone Here Is Lying will be published on 6th July by Transworld Digital as a Kindle and Bantam in hardcover.
fullybooked2017 
Leave a comment