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Lisa Unger really does a fine line in creepiness. I didn’t remember it so much from her first two novels, SLIVER OF TRUTH and BEAUTIFUL LIES, but BLACK OUT stayed with me, if not haunting my dreams, at least invading that vulnerable time just before one drops off to sleep, for several nights. The prologue depicts a woman aboard a ship, thinking about her life and hoping that the report of her death (which will, of course, be greatly exaggerated) will not be too traumatic for her small daughter, Victory. The book itself begins with Annie Powers as she pushes her shopping trolley through a supermarket, thinking not of the shopping but of the reaction her mother, who named her Ophelia, would have to the woman she has become. Now happily married and the mother of a four-year-old daughter, Annie may have changed her name but she is still fleeing her former life, when she was indeed Ophelia, and bound to a man named Marlowe, son of Frank Geary, a condemned murderer and the man who married Ophelia’s mother. Ophelia had a very troubled childhood, bereft of her father, a tattoo artist more notable for his absences than his occasional presence. Small wonder, then, that she eventually needs the services of a psychiatrist-- especially since Ophelia was complicit with Marlowe in some spectacular crimes. Annie is haunted by her past, but it is a past she cannot truly remember, as she has suppressed clear memories of what happened to her and what she did. Annie’s terror of the Gearys, father and son, becomes more easily explicable as the narrative continues but even the statement that Marlowe is dead does not reassure her. She simply doesn’t believe it. There is no denying that this is a superbly written book. There is also no denying that I couldn’t wholly enjoy it, but that is just me. I can recognise a beautifully plotted book with the tension gradually building and the suspense heightened perfectly. The characters are excellently drawn. I know I wouldn’t want to meet any of them in an unfrequented, ill-lit place! The one exception to this is Ophelia’s father, whom I found rather attractive, in a strange kind of way. In any case, he does not occupy a very great space in the book - he is always too intent on escaping whatever is going on. The story of betrayal certainly makes the reader pity the damaged protagonist, even when she is no longer the troubled, persecuted teenager but a wealthy, secure wife. The byways which the plot explores are very murky and terrifying. A lot of the time it is difficult for the reader to understand just what is real in the events that occupy Annie/Ophelia’s life. I have no hesitation in recommending such a well written book to crime fiction aficionados. I just wish it hadn’t got under my skin to the extent that it did!
Reviewed by Denise Pickles, April 2008
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