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Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey review – satisfying, cathartic mystery

A desperate mother seeks to understand why her teenage daughter briefly disappeared in Healey’s follow-up to her Costa award debut

In a world of ever more convoluted plot twists, here’s a true novelty: a mystery novel where the mystery is set up on the first page, and then straightforwardly solved at the end. Emma Healey is the young novelist whose debut, Elizabeth Is Missing, about an elderly woman with dementia, won the Costa first novel award in 2014. The achievement of this follow-up lies its finely drawn mother/daughter pairing and sharp take on the nitty-gritty of contemporary familial relationships.

The novel is written in the third person, but we see everything from the point of view of the desperately anxious Jen, who “never seemed to get the reaction she expected from other people. It was as though they didn’t think she was the person she thought she was.” Jen is trying not to put a foot wrong, but detonates bombs wherever she goes. Lana is her intensely strong-willed and utterly miserable daughter, prone to self-harm, who at the beginning of the novel has disappeared for four days and been found again. She is the scariest type of adolescent: scathing, rude, demanding, but underneath it all very sad and frightened.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2GZTKBL
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