As we learned in Unravelling Oliver, Liz Nugent doesn’t much believe in heroes either. She also has quite a way with a memorable opening line: “My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it” is how Lydia Fitzsimons begins Nugent’s absorbing new novel, Lying in Wait. Lydia, whose desiccated south Dublin gentility barely conceals her delirious instability, shares the narrative with her son, Laurence, and Annie’s sister, Karen.
Once she has finished the girl off with a blow from a Krooklok, Lydia takes charge. The Fitszsimons family lives in Avalon, Lydia’s ancestral home; their large rear garden is not overlooked, and Lydia knows “exactly the spot she could be buried”: on the site of an ornamental pond which Daddy had filled in after Lydia’s sister’s death in childhood.
With Karen determined to find out what happened to Annie, and Laurence convinced his father is up to no good, the skeletons emerge from their closets with pleasing regularity. Nugent moves the action surefootedly across location and social class; her prose is fluent and propulsive, her characters are complex and credible. Redolent of Highsmith and Du Maurier, and with a distinct nod to Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, Lying in Wait is an ingenious and accomplished suspense novel whose ending is as bleak as anything I’ve read this year.