Author: Shari Lapena
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Pages: 320
The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena was a well written
thriller, that left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied.
I wouldn’t fault the writing for that. The author kept the
pace right, offering us little details that pulled us into reading.
Anne and Marco Conti have been invited to a dinner party by
next door neighbours Cynthia and Graham Stillwell. As Cynthia insists on a
child-free evening, they have to leave six-month-old baby Cora in her playpen
at home. When the babysitter cancels at the last moment, Anne is unwilling to
go ahead with the party, but Marco convinces her otherwise. They decide to
check on the baby every half hour.
At the party, Marco, who is reticent and moody at home, becomes
the life of the party, flirting openly with the glamorous Cynthia, which becomes
a comment on the state of their marriage.
A little after midnight, the Contis return home to find
their baby taken. The police are called in, and Detective Rasbach is touched by
the obvious distress of the parents yet something feels off. He also feels the
strain in the marital relationship.
The parents become his prime suspects,
Marco, because of the financial ills plaguing his company, and Anne, because of
her tendency to be violent when under severe stress. And yet he can’t quite
figure out what they have done wrong, other than leave their child unattended,
and how they are implicated in the kidnapping of their own child.
Soon he finds the treadmarks of another car, and reasons
that either the kidnapper acted on his own or was Marco’s accomplice.
The police do everything in their power to trace the baby.
Yet they are unable to trace the whereabouts of the infant. Then Marco gets the
idea of offering the kidnapper $3 million to bring Cora back and not face
prosecution. Alice and Richard Dries, Anne’s extremely wealthy mother and
stepfather, who dislike Marco, fork up the money. The Drieses add their own
drama to the mix.
When Detective Rasbach interviews Cynthia, he discovers a
whole lot of secrets tumbling out. But the truth is even stranger than we, the
readers, imagined.
I won’t tell you whether baby Cora is found and what happens
to the other characters, but I will tell you that the ending was completely
unexpected and completely blew me away. I wish it didn’t have to be quite that
way.
I found the title of the book more than a little misleading.
At the beginning of the story, we see two couples so we don’t know which one
the title refers to. Very quickly we figure out that the couple refers to the
Contis, but the novel isn’t written from the POV of the Stillwells, so calling
the Contis the Couple Next Door continues to be misleading.
While the story is
written in the 3rd person present tense, the writing takes us into
the minds of Anne, Marco and Detective Rasbach.
I am not too sure about the use of the present tense. Maybe
the author intended to render a certain urgency to the narrative, as it should
be when a little baby goes missing. But there are times when it becomes necessary
to slip into the past, and the author couldn’t quite give the transition into
flashback mode the fluidity it needed. Sentence construction becomes awkward.
I thought the author should have given us a little more
about the dynamics of the relationships between the characters. A little more
of what was going on inside their heads would have added a more interesting dimension to the story.
(I read an ARC from First To Read.)
(I read an ARC from First To Read.)
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