Accident Or Murder?
In Mary Kubica’s suspense drama, Every Last Lie, Clara Solberg’s life comes crashing down when her husband Nick is killed in a car crash; their four-year-old daughter Maisie, who was in the backseat, miraculously survives unhurt, with no memory of the accident.
When Clara gets the news, she has just delivered her son, Felix for days ago. Her father and Nick’s friend Connor helps her cope with the tragedy. But there are expenses and unexpected crises that keep popping up. Clara had put all her savings into Nick’s dental business; her father offers to help, but she knows that he has his own burden to carry, what with his wife suffering from dementia.
Maisie is an annoying, self-centred kid, the kind who will demand to be taken to the bathroom at the most inconvenient time, and throw tantrums at the slightest opportunity. Clara is unable to tell the child that her father is dead.
Then Maisie lets drop that a “bad man” was after them, and gets hysterical at the sight of a black car. Clara suspects that her husband’s accident may have been murder. The cops are not in the least cooperative, so a grieving Clara, tries to investigate herself.
Kubica writes from Clara and Nicks’s voices—she in the present discovering things Nick hid from her; he in the past, talking of the trouble he is facing in his business that is spiraling out of control.
The pace and suspense build up to a point, but redundant characters like the neighbour with an abusive husband and Clara’s ill mother, hamper the flow; too many red herrings are bunged in, so that the climax comes as a downer, and the narrative of Clara’s problems is left dangling.
Every Last Lie
By Mary Kubica
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 331
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