‘A Thousand Lies’ by Laura
Wilson
ISBN 0-75285-982-X
A Thousand Lies is Laura Wilson's sixth psychological crime novel. She once said at a Mystery Women meeting that
she liked to experience what she was writing about and gave as an example the
drowning in the bath incident in Dying Voices; her intention was to be held underwater, though, not to
drown. She has moved into more terrifying psychological plots and, one hopes,
she no longer
experiences
them all.
In A Thousand Lies all the families have damaged lives. Amy Vaughan is a
journalist whose mother, Patti, subjected her daughter to Munchausen
By Proxy abuse in order to regain the attention of her
wayward husband. She finds she is related to a family, the Shands,
whose father subjects his daughter, Sheila, to horrifying sexual experiences
weekly from when the child was twelve years old, and his wife to extreme
physical violence. Incidental characters in the novel have suffered lesser, but
still considerable, traumatic experiences in childhood. In fact, there seems to
be no approach to normality, if such exists, in any of the families involved.
This makes her novel sound depressing, and I
haven't included the woman's skeleton found in the wood and the murder of a new born
baby. So look for an ending which is
"making the best of what is left" rather than "living happily
ever after" for the five people who are left alive at the end of the book.
Like other writers of psychological novels - Minette Walters comes to mind - Laura Wilson is more
concerned with mystery novels that explore ‘why done it’ rather than ‘who done
it’. The novel starts with the finding of a skeleton in the woods and the
murderer is not revealed until near the end of the book. The incidents that
lead to this discovery are told through two main characters, Amy and Sheila,
and through three diaries which have been kept by Sheila and Mo, the two
sisters, and Iris, the mother. The opportunities the book gives the writer to
explore the minds and styles of her characters and to get under their skins are
quite remarkable. As in her other books, she moves comfortably and accurately
through the more recent years of the twentieth century, in this case 1950 to
1987.
I like her style, her use of dialogue and the
mixture she presents of detailed descriptions of houses, streets, institutions
and interiors. I like her use of unusual word associations and her own creation
of words. For example, "a landscape of feral mattresses", - an old
people's home is "a geriatric gulag". Houses are described as Tudorbethan and Jacobethan. Some
interesting similes you can discover for yourself. Altogether it makes a
convincing, compelling and fascinating if, at times, disturbing read.
------
Rosemary
Brown
Laura
Wilson's other books are: A
Little Death, Dying Voices, My Best Friend, Hello Bunny
.