5 Stars
I loved this book. Flynn Berry creates an indomitable character in Claire, a British General Practitioner who displays great courage and resourcefulness in investigating, as an adult, a vicious murder that she witnessed when she was only 8 years old.
A Double Life is a psychological suspense thriller set in present-day London and Scotland. It is loosely based on the story of Lord Lucan, a Member of Parliament who disappeared in 1979 after being accused of murder. The real Lord Lucan had several children; Berry imagines how such a man’s daughter and son would have coped with the fallout from the murder and their subsequent life in Witness Protection, where their greatest fear was that their father might one day return.
A Double Life reveals the depravity of the scions of the Upper Class—those Oxford men who speak with cut-glass accents and throw their privilege around like a medieval torture device against those less endowed with cash, connections, and real estate. It shows how the crimes they committed as students—for the sheer arrogance of proving they could escape punishment—led to repercussions that haunted their children for decades afterwards.
My one quibble is with the editing: the book contains many independent clauses or sentences that should have been separated by a period or semicolon. I read—and loved—Berry’s previous book, Under the Harrow, and noticed this error in that book also. This seems to be one of the few weaknesses in her writing style, one a good editor should correct.
Fans of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train and Liz Nugent’s Unraveling Oliver will not be able to put this book down.
Weekends@Peet's 