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Throughout WOMAN WITH A SECRET, the reader is mostly in the head of the eponymous woman, which is not a particularly pleasant place to be. Nicki is self-centered and a pathological liar, whether she’s lying to herself or to everyone around her. Yes, she had an unloved childhood with her parents doing psychologically appalling things to her, and we learn more about this during the course of the book. But somehow she’s turned that childhood and adolescent experience into a good reason to betray everyone who is important to her in her adult life – her children, her sister-in-law ex-best-friend, and, of course, her husband. Nicki seems to spend a lot of time in a fugue state where reality isn’t clear and anxiety is high, and this sense of confusion carries over to the reader. In this way, one might wish that Sophie Hannah’s skills at characterization were not quite so acute.
Nicki got herself involved in not one, but two, online "affairs," When she is caught by a policeman doing something she shouldn't be doing, she swears off online interactions for all of three and a half weeks. After that, she can't help herself and plunges back into the hidden and secret world of online sex. Unfortunately, the man she thinks she has been hooking up with online is murdered in a spectacularly odd manner, and Nicki becomes a suspect at the same time that she is enmeshed in the investigation. Nicki tries to lie her way through that investigation, and it is only because of the good detective work of Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer (this being their 9th in the series), that she manages not to get tossed into jail at the get-go.
WOMAN WITH A SECRET, which was originally published in the UK as THE TELLING ERROR in 2014, doesn't feel like a series book. The action is seen so keenly from Nicki's confused point of view that the detectives seem unimportant. Though, of course, in the end they manage to clear the confusion that Nicki has raised in the reader's mind to come to an acceptable conclusion to the odd murder. For the reader who likes to be thrown into the mind of an unreliable narrator, this book will appeal. For those who like a clearer explication, the book will be maddening.
§ Sharon Mensing is the Head of School of Emerald Mountain School, an independent school in the mountains of Colorado, where she lives, reads, and enjoys the outdoors.
Reviewed by Sharon Mensing, December 2015
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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