Over recent years Laura Lippman has marked out a reputation for being one of the most skilled exponents of the psychological thriller. Her new novel I'd Know You Anywhere should enhance that reputation.
It tells the inter-twined stories of Walter Bowman, a convicted killer on Death Row, and Eliza Benedict, a 38-year-old housewife who was the only victim of the killer known to have escaped his clutches.
As Bowman approaches his date with death, he reaches out to his former kidnap and rape victim in a letter, apparently to apologise to her.
The letter unsettles the equilibirium of Eliza's quiet and comfortable suburban life. As a 38-year-old wife and mother of two, 23 years removed from her ordeal, Eliza has buried it deep in her past. Her children know nothing of it and she and her husband - with whom she shares a caring and loving relationship - has carefully constructed a secure life for them that attempts to hold the dangerous outside world at bay. (As her daughter, Iso, hits her teenage years this causes an inevitable tension familiar to most parents of children that age but exacerbated by Eliza's own experience.)
After her initial shock at hearing from her former captor, Eliza eventually decides to begin a correspondence with him. Her apparent motives are not easy to understand for those around her but appear to stem from a mixture of curiosity about Bowman and a desire to find justice for other suspected, but as yet unproven victims of him. But beyond that, and largely concealed from her family, is Eliza's need to reconnect with an event that was pivotal in her life and to understand better what happened.
The construction of the story is nothing short of masterful. Through flashbacks to the time of the kidnapping and through other characters with a stake in Bowman's fate - an aggressive and campaigning woman who visits him in prison, and the mother of his one proven murder victim, who believes Eliza could have done something to prevent her daughter's death - Lippman gradually reveals what happened during the long period of Eliza's kidnap.
As she does so also charts how the adult Eliza copes with the re-emergence of her adolescent trauma, how it impacts her family and probes at Bowman's own motives for reviving the story.
In a book that is largely and thankfully devoid of set-piece drama - no shoot-outs, no car chases here - the story is brought to the boil with exceptional skill and the tension rises throughout.
Lippman builds a bond between the reader and Eliza that is central to this and then gently claws away at it by examining the relationship between kidnapper and victim and raising questions about whether Eliza could have taken actions that would have led to a different outcome.
This is the consummate psychological thriller - one that leaves the reader asking questions in the dark long after the book has been put down - and it is a very fine writer at her considerable best.
REVIEWS of previous novels by Laura Lippman:
