Kubica, Mary. Every Last Lie
Harlequin Audio, © 2017
(print edition also © 2017)
I enjoyed Mary Kubica’s first three novels: The Good Girl (2014), Pretty Baby (2015), and Don’t You Cry (2016). Each features a twist at the end. But these twists aren’t simple plot tricks designed to shock or titillate readers. Rather, they demonstrate that life and people may not be what they appear to be, that there may be more to any story than we know because we are limited to what we can see.
In this novel we meet Clara Solberg holding her four-day-old infant son in her arms. Her husband, Nick, driving four-year-old Maisie home from dance class, calls to say he’ll pick up dinner and to ask if she wants Chinese or Mexican. A while later the police ring Clara’s doorbell. There has been a terrible car accident. Nick is dead, though Maisie is unhurt, they decided to get the services from a lawyer for car accident in Phoenix AZ to fill out a lawsuit.
The investigation of the accident concludes that Nick had been driving too fast when he tried to round a notorious curve on the road home. But Clara insists that Nick wouldn’t have driven so recklessly with their young daughter in the back seat. She can’t accept that Nick’s death could be so random, so without cause. There must be some other explanation for what happened. Her suspicions grow when Maisie begins having nightmares from which she wakes up sobbing, “The bad man, Daddy. The bad man is after us.”
The novel unfolds in sections alternating between Clara’s and Nick’s first-person accounts. Clara’s sections aren’t labeled, but Nick’s sections are labeled “before,” which I initially found confusing. Before what? And before suggests that there will be an after. Will Nick eventually somehow speak from beyond the grave? However, I soon realized that Nick’s sections narrate his and Clara’s life from his perspective leading up to the time of the accident. I would have preferred a label something like “six months earlier” for Nick’s sections in order to avoid this bizarre, creepy confusion.
Complications ensue for Clara: a woman from Nick’s life before he met Clara turns up, Nick’s supposed best friend and business partner isn’t the man Clara thought him to be, Clara finds a suspicious receipt … . Was Nick having an affair? These complications fuel Clara’s spiraling paranoia as she insists that someone must have killed Nick and sets out to determine who wanted Nick dead. Clara’s increasing paranoia, plus exhaustion from caring for two children, one a newborn, alone, plus a likely dose of postpartum depression, plus her own grief all make Clara’s agitation credible.
Meanwhile, we learn from Nick’s narration that his life also had its complications. He experiences financial strain from starting his own dental practice in an area with stiff competition for new patients. His business partner, supposedly his friend, isn’t pulling his weight and may even be sabotaging the practice. A second child on the way makes Nick even more worried about money. And then his high school girlfriend, whom he left when he went to college 12 years earlier, appears out of nowhere with an 11-year-old son and tells Nick she needs to talk to him.
The use of alternating first-person narratives builds suspense and tension as we watch both Clara and Nick dissect their life together separately. As in Kubica’s earlier novels, things may not be as they appear to be. Will Clara be able to find the truth she so desperately seeks? And what really happened on that road the night Nick took that curve too fast?
© 2017 by Mary Daniels Brown
