Review: 'Lying in Wait' by Liz Nugent

I love me a good thriller, especially if it is all wrapped up in dysfunctional family relationships. Thrillers can, unfortunately, be very repetitive, especially with how many thrillers are saturating the market at the moment. Sometimes stories stand out, however, with how different or interesting they are. I've been blessed enough to read, and see, some brilliant thrillers in the last few months and I'm definitely adding Liz Nugent's Lying in Wait to that list. Thanks to Penguin Books and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 29/12/2016
Publisher: Penguin Books UK

The last people who expect to be meeting with a drug-addicted prostitute are a respected judge and his reclusive wife. And they certainly don't plan to kill her and bury her in their exquisite suburban garden.

Yet Andrew and Lydia Fitzsimons find themselves in this unfortunate situation.
While Lydia does all she can to protect their innocent son Laurence and their social standing, her husband begins to falls apart.

But Laurence is not as naïve as Lydia thinks. And his obsession with the dead girl's family may be the undoing of his own.

One of the best things about Lying in Wait is that it grips you right from the beginning with a brilliant opening line:

'My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it.'

Not only does it put you right into the mess of the situation, it also immediately gives you a good idea of the characters you will be dealing with. Nugent has split up her novel into separate chapters with separate narrators: Lydia, Laurence and Karen. Having different narrators can both work for and against a novel. On the one hand it will give you a number of  different perspectives upon the same event, priceless in thrillers, but on the other hand it can also distract from the story the novel is trying to tell. I'm sure we've all read novels with multiple narrators where we ended up hating, at least, one of the narrator's chapters passionately. Thankfully no such thing happens in Lying in Wait. Rather, Nugent masterfully crafts her narrative through her characters, never forgetting she is the one who is telling the story in the end. What one character reveals the other shows us unknowingly, what one feels the other senses, while what one does the other completely misinterprets. Being stuck inside three different heads makes for a surprisingly claustrophobic read.

Nugent deals with a lot of different themes within this novel. Of course there is the main story (the whodunnit of sorts), but around that swirl story lines about gender and class. Set in the Ireland of the last century, the women in Lying in Wait find themselves dealing with the expectations of others regarding their behaviour, looks and future. Whether it's sex, pregnancy, marriage, divorce, or simply having a job, Nugent addresses these issues in the stories of Lydia, Annie, Karen and Helen. What makes their portrayal different from other novels depicting women's issues, however, is that Nugent doesn't avoid to discuss class as well. Whereas Lydia is upper class and expects to be treated as such, Annie, Karen and Helen are working class. This divide expresses itself in much more than just the gross outlines of their characters, it colours their journeys throughout the book and shapes their actions and psyches. Although it used to be easy to forget about class as a major Issue, what between feminism and racism being major conversation topics, but with recent events such as Brexit and Trump, it has come right back to the forefront of our social consciousness and it is rewarding to see authors having already brought it back in their works as well.

Liz Nugent is brilliant at slowly but surely developing her characters over hundreds of pages. None of her main characters are the same towards the end of the novel. As I said above, part of this novel is about dysfunctional family relationships, at the heart of which lies love. Whether it is mother-son, husband-wife, sister-sister, once it comes to loving and living together, every reader knows relationships can become difficult. A good author doesn't just know this, but knows how to use it for their novel. Nugent does the latter, the family relationships becoming central to how characters act. The murder, which happens even before the start of the novel, is like the match that sets of the fuse in all the characters' relationships. Nugent's novel covers a range of years, yet never does her story loose its immediacy. Her writing is gripping, not letting the reader go until the last year and then just dropping them into nothing. Lying in Wait is a roller coaster of a read that never really lets you go.

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

Lying in Wait genuinely had me by the throat for a few days. Even when I put it down and walked away it was right in the back of my mind. Nugent has definitely won a fan in me with her thrilling writing and great character development. I'd recommend this to fans of psychological thrillers!