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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR
by Nicci French
Minotaur Books, May 2010
375 pages
$25.99
ISBN: 0312375409


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Before, a group of friends came together to rehearse some music they will play at a friend's wedding. After, one of the group has been murdered, another is responsible, and a third is implicated in concealing the body. This story begins with After and is told in chronological layers, each scene from the past followed by scenes about what is happening after the murder. It's up to the reader to put the parts together, and the structure of the story creates a kind of architectural suspense. The reader is caught off balance from the start; we aren't even sure which of the characters has been murdered. And that's just the first of many puzzles to unravel.

Nicci French, the collaboration of a husband and wife team, has established a reputation for building suspense out of friendships that sour, relationships that are tested, and narration that's unreliable. In this story, we meet Bonnie Graham as she is holding off panic, trying to decide what to do about the body lying on the floor of her small flat. She recruits a friend to help; together they cook up a plan to conceal the crime and Bonnie goes out into the world, carefully adjusting her scarf to hide the bruises on her neck. The "before" sections introduce her circle of friends, each of whom has a role to play in the drama that unfolds. At the center is the volatile and talented musician Hayden, who is strangely attractive, but in a dangerous, discordant way. As Bonnie says to herself "he seemed to have come from nowhere and to carry with him an air of mystery and hurt. We wanted to solve him and we wanted to cure him."

There's a sly O. Henry-style ironic twist at the heart of the story, and one brilliant moment toward the end when the rug is pulled out from under us. But the suspense relies too much on Bonnie's stream of consciousness as she frets about what to do next. Unfortunately, she has a curiously bland personality and never quite comes to life except as a bundle of frayed nerves. Though the writing is more than competent and the structure is clever, the characters aren't quite up to the challenge of making us care. And that's a shame, because Nicci French is generally able to make ordinary human relationships under stress as suspenseful as a ticking bomb.

§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.

Reviewed by Barbara Fister, May 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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