Mysteries: ‘Don't Let Him In' and ‘Murder Takes a Vacation'

Wall Street Journal

4 hours ago

Midway through Lisa Jewell's 'Don't Let Him In,' two friends, Martha and Grace, meet for lunch. When Martha describes how attentive her previously errant boyfriend has become, Grace is relieved but still skeptical. 'I thought it was going to end up that he was one of those blokes you read about,' she admits. 'The ones who marry loads of women and lie to everyone and steal all their money.' That fairly sums up the deceptions at the core of this subtly layered British thriller, but it's not the whole story. For the crimes perpetrated here, including murder, are part of a larger mosaic, one that depicts the intersecting lives of three female characters so vividly that we feel, at times, more like voyeurs than readers. Their intimate thoughts become as familiar to us as their occasionally messy households. The dishes piled in the sink, the morning scramble, the sudden silence of an emptied house: Ms. Jewell captures these moments, as she does the doubts and fears of the residents.
One such is Ash (short for Aisling), a young woman who 'feels the thud and canter of time running by as her early twenties bleed into her late twenties and thirty appears heavy on the horizon.' She's still reeling from the death of her father—who was pushed under a train by an apparently deranged stranger—when her mother, Nina, welcomes handsome Nick Radcliffe into their seaside home. Nick claims to have known Ash's father, but she is wary of the charmer with 'neat cuticles and defined muscles and a brand-new haircut.' Ash wonders: 'Why has this man never been married?' The reader knows that he is married (a fact revealed at the outset), and much more, because alternating chapters of the novel are narrated by this consummate liar. We see the world both as it is, therefore, and through his eyes. We see the world both as it is and through his eyes. 'They are my puppets now in so many ways,' Nick gloats—with a touch of melodrama—when he begins spying on Nina's family, 'and I am their master.'
As Nick's deceptions multiply, we fear for his victims—chief among them Tara, a successful businesswoman who almost outwits him, and Martha, the sweet-natured florist who might have been his salvation—and brace ourselves for the unmasking of a con artist who remains defiant to the last. 'You all wanted me,' he silently protests when finally cornered. 'You all had gaping voids in your lives. . . . I did not force one of you to choose me.' By then, Ash has uncovered the truth, if not the bodies, though Ms. Jewell shocks us with one final twist. Over the course of more than 20 novels, she has perfected such denouements. The enduring appeal of her fiction, however, resides not in its cleverness, but in the atmosphere of intimate unease that Ms. Jewell—like her forebear Ruth Rendell—so expertly creates.