My first book. I think it’s pretty good, and it got a great review from Publishers Weekly (below), but it has mixed reviews (861 of them) from readers, mainly because the protagonist is very unlikable. I didn’t know any better! And I assure you, every main character I’ve written since is nice. 🙂
The story: Twenty years ago, Kate Cranbrook’s eyewitness testimony sent the wrong man to prison for rape and murder. When new evidence exonerates him, Kate says that in the darkness and confusion, she must have mistaken her attacker’s identity.
The problem? She is lying. So right there, you can see what I mean about her not being likable. She has done a terrible thing.
Kate would like nothing better than to turn her back on the past, but she is trapped in a stand-off with the real killer. When a body turns up on her doorstep, she resorts to desperate measures to free herself once and for all from a secret that is ruining her life.
Basically, I should have written the story from a different point of view, but telling it in Kate’s own words was such a challenge that I couldn’t resist (and like I said, it was my first book and I didn’t know any better). Some people have described her an an unreliable narrator, but this is not right. She’s a liar all right, but she does not lie to the reader. Not once! She lies to other people (characters in the story) to protect her secret. But she bares her soul to the reader.
Starred review from Publisher’s Weekly:
“The bill for lies told decades earlier comes due for Kate Cranbrook, the complex narrator of Buhmann’s superior debut. In 1986, while Kate was a college student at Sweet Briar in western Virginia, she was raped and witnessed a murder. Kate’s eyewitness testimony convicts a man who’s released more than 20 years later based on DNA evidence. The development isn’t a complete surprise to Kate, who has lived with the knowledge that she perjured herself. Her life since the trial has been a disappointment, and her social life is limited by her possessive and creepy father, Pop, who keeps her on a tight leash. That constraint becomes even more difficult to bear when Kate, who works as a landscaper, falls for a gardener, Tony, and hopes she has found the love of her life. Things don’t go smoothly, and more blood is shed along the way to a jaw-dropping, but logical, climax that will make veteran mystery readers eager for more of Buhmann’s work.”
If you can get past Kate not being a person you would want to know IRL, the plot is tight and twisty, and the ending takes just about everybody by complete surprise. One more review:
“Buhmann does a superb job of letting Kate peel away layer after layer of the façade she’s spent her lifetime creating…The last twenty pages of the book have more twists than a bag of pretzels. The true appeal of the book, though, is in witnessing the disintegration of an obsessive personality…like the train wreck you can’t help but watch. In that regard, Buhmann’s storytelling is in a class with Lolita.” –The Chaotic Reader
Elizabeth Buhmann 