A Final Reckoning

Starred review from September 30, 2013
Chantal Frazer, the heroine of this spine-tingling thriller from Moody (Dancing in the Dark), has existed in a strange limbo since age 12, when her adored older sister, Sabine, was brutally slain while working as an au pair at Weston Lodge in the Cotswolds, along with her charges, 12-year-old George and 13-year-old Edward Palliser. The Honorable Clio Palliser, the boys’ allegedly mentally unstable mother, was convicted of the murders. A native Californian, Chantal went on to study art history at Pomona College like Sabine, and fulfill her sister’s dream career of working as an art expert at a London auction house. Now, 23 years after Sabine’s death, she discovers that Weston Lodge is being converted into an upscale hotel. On a vacation there, Chantal meets various people who knew her sister and the Palliser family, but, as she probes deeper into old horrors, realizes that she may be putting her own life at risk. The hideous and long-buried truth will catch most readers by surprise.

February 18, 2013
Moody (Dancing in the Dark) packs this flimsy story with improbabilities, and making the characters comment “This is all too much of a coincidence” doesn’t fool the readers into ignoring the author’s clumsy engineering. Kate Lennox survived a car wreck in Ecuador that killed her dad, his assistant, and her stepmother and stepsister. She can’t remember much of that day or how the accident occurred, and it haunts her. Years later, she’s in England, trying to work through a recent divorce, find a job that will get her away from a man she thinks is stalking her, and get a place of her own; but each achievement connects her anew to that awful day in Ecuador. Moody’s stream-of-consciousness style bogs down with six different viewpoint characters, and her usual tight plotting has gone AWOL, leaving numerous threads unresolved.