'Five-year-old Ava Boone has been missing for six months. There have been no leads, no arrests, no witnesses. The only suspect was quiet, middle-aged Leland Ernest. And Grace Wright has just bought the house next door. Recently divorced, Grace uprooted her two small children to start again and hopes the move will reset her crippling insomnia. But now she understands bargain-price for her beautiful new house.
'With whispered neighbourhood gossip and increasingly sleepless nights, Grace develops a fierce obsession with Leland and the safety of her children. Could she really be living next door to a child-kidnapper? A murderer? With reality and dream blurring more each day, Grace desperately pursues the truth - following Ava's family, demanding answers from the police - and then a body is discovered... '
Whenever a book is written from the point of view of one of the characters their narrative becomes incredibly important, they're the person that we're experiencing the world through after all. We only have their word that the events we're reading are true, that they're not twisting things to make a narrative more palatable, or to shape themselves into a hero or victim. When a narrator becomes unreliable, when you're not sure what you can trust, a book takes on a very different feel, and you're left constantly on your toes. This is something that Sharon Doering does with flair in She Lies Close.
She Lies Close follows Grace Wright, a recently divorced mother of two who's living with her children in a new home that she purchased to give them a fresh start. Having left her husband following a string of infidelities, she's struck out on her own to make a life she can be proud of, and one that her kids will love. Unfortunately, this plan doesn't get to come into being when Grace learns that her neighbour, Leland Ernest, was recently questioned by police about the disappearance of five-year-old Ava Boone.
Despite having no charges placed against them, and apparently only having been questioned the once, Grace begins to obsess over her neighbour. She begins to feel that her new home, her fresh start, is unsafe. That her own young daughter might be in the sights of a child killer. There's no proof that Leland is involved, or that Ava is even dead, but with her having been missing for months Grace becomes convinced that her murder at Leland's hands is the only explanation.
What follows is a narrative that slowly descends into madness, as Grace's psyche begins to fall to pieces. It begins with trouble sleeping, and obsessing over articles online about child kidnappings, and ends up with a woman barely keeping things together, trying desperately to maintain her job, her children's safety, and her own sanity.
This is what makes She Lies Close instantly jump out at me from other similar books like this. This isn't so much about the mystery of Ava Boone's disappearance, though that does play a major role, but the affect that this has on someone completely unconnected to the case.
Grace isn't involved in this case, she doesn't know the Boone's or have any information that could help, yet it begins to consume her life. It's something that I'm sure we can all recognise, whether within ourselves or others. There's always that one news story, that one event that causes panic or makes a stir within people. I remember a few from my childhood that caused differing degrees of panic in adults, that changed the ways that they acted or treated their children's safety. This is the main narrative thread of this book, a woman who's fear for her children causes an obsession that could cause more harm than good.
The changes that it causes in Grace a pretty dramatic, but because you're along for the ride, seeing her sanity slowly unravel you almost don't realise how bad things have gotten for her until she interacts with another adult, someone on the outside of her obsession. It's in these brief moments that you realise just how off the rails Grace has gone, how extreme her actions have been; actions that even the reader might have found justified just pages before.
The fact that Grace's grip on her life becomes so tenuous makes the mystery so much juicer too, because you begin to question the things that she's experiencing. Did these events actually happen, has she blown things out of proportion, or is she bang on the money? There were times during the book where I genuinely couldn't tell you what would happen next, because I found myself second guessing everything; and in some cases third and fourth guessing. I could have seen the book ending with everything Grace had seen and experienced being one hundred percent true, it could have all been part of her delusion, or perhaps a mixture of reality and her unravelling mental condition.
Sharon Doering has managed to take a fairly simple and relatable story, a woman worrying about her children's safety, and managed to craft it into a tale with more twists and turns that a maze, where you can never be sure of what you're reading, and you'll be unable to figure out what's coming next. A brilliant debut that shows that this is definitely a writer that you'll want to keep your eye on.
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