Hallie Ephron is the exceptionally savvy crime fiction reviewer for The Boston Globe and the author of a widely admired book on how to write good mysteries.
William Morrow has just provided strong evidence that Ephron knows what she’s talking about — the new thriller, “Never Tell a Lie,” which I consumed in two gulps over the weekend (if I didn’t have to go out Saturday night, I probably would have polished it off in one sitting).
“Never Tell a Lie” is set in the Boston suburbs and has that clammy/compelling this-could-happen-to-me feeling that has powered Harlan Coben’s books for the past several years (his are set in very realistically rendered New Jersey suburban towns).
The story opens at a quintessential suburban event — a Saturday afternoon yard sale in early November. The eight months pregnant Ivy Rose and her husband, David — who are both in their early 30s — decide to get rid of piles of junk that came along with the Victorian house they purchased a few years earlier.
An old high school acquaintance of Ivy and David’s turns up, looking so different from the dumpy, outcast girl of a decade earlier that they don’t recognize her at first.
Melinda White is also hugely pregnant and tells the Roses that she used to play in their house when she was a child and her mother worked for the owner.
There is something slightly off about Melinda’s comments and behavior, but Ivy and David are so distracted by the yard sale that they don’t seem to pick up on the young woman’s oddness (a feeling that comes through to the reader loud and clear).
David agrees to show Melinda the interior of the old house and Ivy returns to overseeing the sale.
Ephron pulls us into a completely realistic situation and setting — and draws us close to David and Ivy very quickly — before a bomb is dropped on the couple. The police show up on their doorstep a few days later with the news that Melinda disappeared on Saturday and the yard sale was the last place she was seen. A few witnesses noticed David taking the woman into the house, but no one (including Ivy) saw Melinda walk out.
In the space of just a few paragraphs, Ephron plunges Ivy (and the reader) into an all too plausible nightmare scenario — the Roses become suspects in whatever might have happened to Melinda. And Ivy begins to suspect that her husband is not being absolutely honest with her.
I would be doing Ephron a terrible disservice to give away any more of her Hitchcockian paranoia plot — Alfred always loved to place ordinary people in sudden and terrible jeopardy.
It’s a wonderful debut novel.
