My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it. 

On the surface, Lydia Fitzsimons has the perfect life—wife of a respected, successful judge, mother to a beloved son, mistress of a beautiful house in Dublin. That beautiful house, however, holds a secret. 

And when Lydia’s son, Laurence, discovers its secret, wheels are set in motion that lead to an increasingly claustrophobic and devastatingly dark climax.

Given that my last Liz Nugent novel was the disturbing and unpredictable ‘Strange Sally Diamond‘, I should have expected that ‘Lying In Wait‘ wouldn’t be a .Christie-style murder mystery with the plot looping slowly towards the discovery of the guilty and the dispensing of justice. ”Lying in Wait’ was a dark, compelling story that chronicled the damage one broken person can inflict through decades of violence, delusion, and ruthless manipulation.

Although a murder is at the heart of the story, there is no mystery about who did it. Instead, the novel is an extended exploration of the impact of the murder and its subsequent cover-up on the murderer, her husband, her son, and the sister of the murdered woman. It is a story of malice, mental illness, betrayal and the corruption of love by selfishness and love corrupted by selfishness, sprinkled with moments of unreliable happiness.

The story, which extends over decades and is told from the point of view of three closely connected people: upper-middle class Lydia whose sense of entitlement enables her to kill not just without remorse but with the certainty that her actions are unquestionably justified; her son, Lawrence, on whom she dotes and who is initially ignorant of the murder; and the model-beautiful working-class Karen Doyle, sister of Annie Doyle, alleged drug addict and prostitute, who Lydia murdered and everyone else thinks has moved away.

The portraits of all three people are vivid and credible. Each of them has a vastly different understanding of what is going on. Lydia is even more of a monster than she first appears to be, which is saying something given that the book opens with her dealing Annie Doyle a deadly blow to the head. Laurence is naive, weak, easily and constantly manipulated by his mother and torn between his instinct to hide his family’s crimes, in which his mother has implicated him and his growing attraction to Karen Doyle, who is relentlessly seeking her sister. Of the three, only Karen has no motives for her actions other than finding the truth, which makes her the person most at risk.

The way the plot brings Karen into closer and closer contact with Laurence and Lydia over not just weeks but years, kept twisting my emotions. It gave me time to like and fear for Karen and to understand and even start to make allowances for Laurence while making it increasingly clear how broken and how dangerous Lydia was.

This dark story is made darker by more than the dynamics of this tragic triangle. Karen has to deal with a misogynistic predatory police detective, a husband who moves swiftly from protective to violently controlling and class-based discrimination. Karen finds ways of dealing with those things. What she can’t free herself from is the hurt, part anger, part guilt. part grief, caused by her sister’s unexplained and unexpected departure.

I was completely wrapped up in the story, especially as the tension mounted towards the end. The ending was darker, more realistic and more upsetting than I expected. It felt real without bringing any sense of relief.

One of the things that amplified my enjoyment of the audiobook was that there were three narrators, one for each point of view. They were all good and having three of them added texture to the story.

Click on the Soundcloud link to listen to Lydia starting the story.