Too good to be true

Winnipeg Free Press

16 hours ago

So many women with newfound love, so many men who are kind and thoughtful and attentive, so many couples playing happy families.
Could be that readers might pick up the latest book Don't Let Him In from British murder mystery author Lisa Jewell, hang in there for a few pages, then check the cover again, mystified at the romance novel into which they've stumbled.
Nina was left devastated when a madman pushed her husband in front of a train; she'd surely never love again, but now, here's handsome Nick with his flowing silver hair and gleaming smile, who knew her late husband Paddy back in the day, and yes, as fortune would have it, they've begun dating, and he's simply marvellous.
Clara Molden photo
Lisa Jewell is the bestselling author of books such as None of This Is True and The Third Wife.
And getting serious fast. Nick is eager to back Nina to add more restaurants to her late chef husband's growing empire.
Martha and her husband Alan have a wee bairn, and her florist shop is doing just grand. They're madly in love. Alan is so supportive, so ambitious to help Martha expand her flourishing business.
We'll also meet, among others, Tara and Amanda and Sarah and Jessica, along with Jonathan and Damian and Andre and Justin, most of them currently paired, with occasional flashbacks to four years ago.
The women are an eclectic bunch; some of the couples are married, some have had children together, some of the women brought children to the relationships now headed towards matrimony, in every case the men having connected so gloriously with the kiddies.
Um, is there going to be a 'but…'?
Yes indeed.
It certainly helps the plot to have adult daughters who don't cotton to the new men in their mothers' lives. They ask questions that may have already occurred to readers.
We slowly learn that one woman is a widow, the husband of her dreams having died overseas. Alas.
The hubby of another woman who is over the moon in love just simply disappeared one day, never to be seen or heard of again. Gone, but not forgotten, as the woman left behind discovers she has tens of thousands of pounds in debt, mortgages and loans she never knew she had.
And all these men, Alan and Nick and all the rest, they have these high-powered jobs that require them to go out of town suddenly for days at a time, or ailing mothers on their deathbeds or needing dementia care — every situation making it really, really difficult to take or return phone calls. Workplaces the women never get to visit, colleagues the women never meet, fellow workers who never get invited over.
And just a bit at a time, there's a need for the men to have money — not all that much to start, just to tide them over while they sort out cash flow problems and collect from debtors.
All right, Lisa, now we're getting somewhere.
Don't Let Him In
Is Don't Let Him In a murder mystery? No spoilers — and don't go fretting about how Nina's husband Paddy died… that's not necessarily suspicious. Nope, not necessarily tied into the plot in any way. Not necessarily.
Is anything starting to get your spidey-senses tingling? All these men in all these women's lives? Could it possibly be that it's all this man in all these women's lives?
Your book club members are scoffing: they're exhausted just trying to live one life, with jobs and kids and finances and schools and elderly parents and a world falling apart all around them. Who could possibly be living more than one life?
How much lying would it take? How much scrambling to remember what stories he'd said to what woman? Just how long could a guy be away tending to other lives, and still have credibility?
Lisa Jewell makes it all quite plausible, all the while not denigrating or belittling strong, intelligent women who might not immediately see — well, things, just things, let's leave it at that. After all, it is a mystery.
A really gripping mystery.
Don't Let Him In can be confusing about when things are happening, about who knows what — you may need a flow chart to remind yourself who's with whom, who the children are, how many marriages get mentioned.
But it's a humdinger of a read. How well do you really know your partner?
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin tried to keep up with all the lies and shenanigans and tight scheduling and impossible juggling, but it was all too much: he inserted his bookmark and had a nap.