Susan Moody's Losing Nicola is one of those lucky finds that I happened to come across on my library's virtual 'new books list'. Often the most entertaining books are found purely by chance, have you noticed that? This one has summer read written all over it with the girl on the cover standing on a sandy path with the striking cloud-filled sky behind her. It's a combination mystery/coming of age story set in Post-WWII Austerity Britain, in particular on the Kentish coastline. The story is divided into two sections--the run up to the murder of a young girl and then twenty years later when her best friend looks back and tries to unravel what happened that fateful summer. Lots of secrets and misunderstood occurrences as the murder is viewed and the story told through the eyes of an adolescent girl.
Life may be difficult after the war, but Alice and her siblings seem to enjoy an idyllic existence with their mother in Shale, a bleak town but one where Alice and her brother Orlando are never at a loss to find something to do. Their father has been largely absent from their lives; first, fighting in the war and now teaching in Oxford where housing is short and expensive, so the family is temporarily split. Fiona and the children live with her aunt in a boarding house in somewhat bohemian circumstances. It's easier to imagine Fiona as a bluestocking living on her own rather than caring for a family as she's somewhat haphazard in her methods, but it's clear she loves her children. While she may well have made a success at being a professor herself, she instead teaches at a local school and publishes stories on the side to help the family financially.
Of the children, Alice and Orlando are closest in age and are inseparable growing up. With so many different people living under one roof, mischief is often easy to get into but also it's a place filled with hidden tensions. Alice and Orlando are just on the cusp of becoming young adults so they understand some of what they hear but not all. Their happy existence is rattled when Nicola, a young Londoner just a few years older than Alice, enters their lives. She is pretty and precocious and a little too knowledgeable about adult things. She sweeps everyone, children anyway, off their feet. All but Orlando are taken with her, and want to be in her glowing circle and crave her attention. She knows how to charm, but she also knows how to be cruel and the spell she casts soon wears thin on Alice.
On Alice's twelfth birthday the inexplicable happens. Nicola shows up at her party and all but ruins it by her behavior. She runs off and later the next day her mangled body is found in a grove where Alice and Orlando go to pick berries. The culprit is never found. Summer turns to fall, Alice and her family move to Oxford and the murder is all but forgotten.
However, the shocking discovery haunts Alice. Twenty years later, after her marriage fails Alice returns to Shale and begins asking questions about that fateful summer where innocence was lost and her friend was murdered. Who could have murdered Nicola? Sexually mature, she had been messing about with one of the paying guests for money. Did her teasing push him over the edge and anger him into hurting her. Both Nicola and Alice had been taking private piano lessons from a German-Jewish refugee who lost his family in war. While Alice finds herself confused over feelings she has for him, Nicola accuses him of misbehavior giving him all too good a motive for wishing her dead. Or the worst scenario, did her beloved Orlando hate her so much he might have caused her harm?
This isn't a typical mystery really, although there is a crime and the truth will be revealed, it's more a quest for understanding--coming to terms with her feelings from that summer so long ago and putting old demons to rest. I thought the solution cleverly accomplished by way of a diary kept by Alice's great aunt and the clues she garners through talking to those few who remain who were present that fateful summer. It was all quite satisfying. I was only thrown for a little loop by something that occurred at the end, which I didn't see coming--not in a bad way, only very surprising. I really enjoyed Losing Nicola and will be on the lookout for other books by Susan Moody.