She Lies Close by Sharon Doering

I would like to thank Sarah from Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Titan

Published – Out Now

Price – £8.99 paperback

Five-year-old Ava Boone has been missing for six months. There are 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... 

Typically, the thriller focuses on the would be victim or the detective. We don’t often think of those impacted by a case. We don’t think how violence can change people’s way of viewing of the world and we don’t think what that will make someone do. In Sharon Doering’s chilling and memorable She Lies Close we get to see how a tragic crime can pull anyone in too deep.

Grace is newly divorced, trying to manage two young children, paying the bills, adapting to her new home and finding now that every damn thing could hurt her or her kids. School [pressures, financial pressures, parental pressures and the social demand that she does it all perfectly are bad enough but in her new home is the local mystery of a young girl’s strange disappearance. Ava Boone has become a press sensation – a girl with a wonderful singing voice who no one has seen for five months. Grace’s anxiety about what could threaten her own children is ever climbing and one of her neighbours points out her isolated next-door neighbour seems to have a few secrets. Grace gets frantic involving herself with the Boones and starting to watch her neighbour ever more closely. As Grace gets more concerned or possibly obsessed, she feels she is the only person with a chance of solving the case and finally having a moment of peace.

This novel is a wonderful character study in the unlikeable character and explaining why someone would behave that way. Everything is told from Grace’s point of view and she is someone that is very aware of what society expects her as a good parent to be and the impossible challenges that image requires her to take on every day. We feel the battle to get kids ready at school; to contain anger at the world and be ever fearful that something is happening or could happen to her kids. Doering though starts to throw in moments that make you question if Grace is entirely just a concerned neighbour – she suddenly starts following the Boones, breaks into a neighbour’s house for evidence and tails suspects in her car. Grace very quickly is becoming someone acting on her instincts to protect and do whatever takes to do that. We are made very uncomfortable by some of her choices (getting more extreme and sudden as the story progresses) and that starts to seed doubts as to is she truly being honest with herself (and us) as to what is going on.

I don’t have children but this book really captures the way parents I know feel about trying to do the right thing and never feeling you’re doing enough and also how they can feel they no longer have any lives of their own. Yet Doering does make you understand despite their tantrums why she loves them so much and wants to protect them from the world. I don’t think I would like Grace if I met her, but I do think I understand her and why she is feeling so lost. I also really liked the way Doering captures the way certain crimes take the public imagination and create a gossip community of accusations and focus. Ava and her family posted video of her singing prior to her disappearance and Doering notes how in our society suddenly now media images are used to create their own theory of who the victim is, what her family are like and how this may have attracted her abductor. We sadly have seen too many crimes where exactly this happened and Doering asks us to say is the issue really Grace not just our whole way of dealing and processing such events?

I’ll be brief on the plot as Grace’s tale is better as a slow reveal, but I liked how we start finding her acting more and more extreme building up tension and doubt in the reader. Her tale slightly don’t make sense and certain events make us question exactly what Grace may have done. It’s a psychological thriller where the reader needs to sometimes sit back and try to work out what is actually taking place.

It is a gripping and uncomfortable thriller that accurately put a very human woman in the centre of a horrific crime. You are her one constant companion watching her mistakes and fearing the consequences in what for her is a world that threatens her family. The triumph of the novel is that you understand her and perhaps the pain lots of other parents do I this unsettling world we put them in. I’m very excited to see what Doering can do next because this is a stunning debut tale.