When you read a Jo Spain stand-alone novel, you know you are going to be misled, made a fool of, and led up the garden path – all in the nicest possible way. Her Tom Reynolds police procedurals (see some reviews here are more straightforward and stick to the conventions of the genre, but when she spins a yarn outside of those confines, you learn to trust her narrators about as far as you can throw a grand piano.
Such is the case in The Perfect Lie. Erin Kennedy – an Irish lass – works in publishing in New York, is married to American cop Danny Ryan, and they live in Newport, Rhode Island. No, Danny is not a fellow Celt, despite his surname, but beautifully black, at least in Erin’s eyes. One morning, she answers the doorbell to their apartment and admits Danny’s cop colleague Ben – stern of face – and a couple of fellow officers. Within seconds Danny, freshly showered and shaved for the day’s shift has walked to the balcony and jumped to his death on the concrete four floors below.
What follows is a journey into a labyrinth of blind alleys and false assumptions. Erin learns that Danny was the subject of an internal police inquiry, and was about to be arrested for corruption. She later discovers that he had secret bank accounts containing tens of thousands of dollars. Two other significant characters are introduced; Cal Hawley, the scion of a wealthy local family who has some connection with what Danny Ryan was involved in before his death, and Karla Delgado, a feisty lawyer who agrees to work for Erin pro-bono.
The split narratives of the book are not for complacent or inattentive readers. A couple of times I had to check back and make sure that I knew exactly what was going on. The viewpoints are these:
- Erin on the morning of Danny’s death, and the weeks following.
- The retrospective account of a young woman called Ally, a proctor at Harvard University.
- Erin, over a year after Danny’s death, when she is in custody and in court being tried for her husband’s murder.
Bullet points one and three seem to be incompatible, so you might think that the obvious solution is that Danny did not die as we are told in the first few pages. The fact that Erin is not allowed to ID her husbands body, and that he is cremated in a closed casket suggests that something strange is going on, but what, exactly – and why? Eventually, the link between Ally, her mentee Lauren Gregory, and the Danny Ryan/ Erin Kennedy story is revealed. And Jo Spain has tricked us – well, I certainly fell for it – into making a huge assumption.
Jo Spain has has created her own version of the classic locked room mystery. It happened, yet it is impossible that it could have happened. She is The Queen of The Night in terms of misdirection and she entices us into a spider’s web where we thrash helplessly until she puts us out of our misery. In the end, however, she can put on her best innocent face and say’ “who…me?’ because when the penny drops we realise we have misled ourselves.This is another masterpiece from, in my opinion, Ireland’s finest contemporary writer. The Perfect Lie is published by Quercus, and is out today, 13th May.
My reviews of other books by Jo Spain can be found HERE
Fans of dark domestic drama should love this. The ‘good man’ in question is Thomas Martin. He was the perfect family man, husband, father son and brother. He had a dream job and a lovely home. But when disaster strikes, and dreadful suffering is inflicted on those he loves, he is forced to conduct the most forensic examination of his own personality, motivation and actions. Ani Katz is a writer, photographer and teacher. She was born and raised on the south shore of Long Island, and holds a MFA in photography from Columbia College, Chicago, and a BA from Yale. She lives in Brooklyn. A Good Man is published by Windmill/Penguin Random House. It came out in hardback in January last year and the paperback will be out on 
I reviewed – and loved – an earlier Heidi Perks novel back in 2019, when 
Jo Spain is, in my opinion, one of the most gifted writers we have. She is based in Dublin, and not content with creating a hugely popular police procedural series featuring Detective Tom Reynolds, she writes scripts and screenplays for television and cinema, and also managed to write superb standalone thrillers. The Perfect Lie belongs to the latter category, but moves the action from Ireland to America’s east coast. Erin Kennedy lives in Newport, Long Island with her detective husband Danny. Her idyllic life turns into a nightmare when he jumps to his death from their fourth-floor apartment.
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