When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. But Lo is no wallflower she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right.
To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping as a result, she is unable to sleep. Ware ( In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.ĭays before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in.
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