If you like crime novels and you don't already know Laura Wilson's work, she is well worth looking for. She writes in the vein of Ruth Rendell, psychological suspense, and she does it really well. I've been collecting her works and will happily make my way through them. I'm already contemplating which book to reach for next. They aren't exactly (at least her novels--she also writes a detective series which I have yet to explore) straightforward crime stories, and they aren't exactly just thrillers, but they have elements of both. I think they have the best elements of each genre with a good dose of the domestic and psychological thrown in.
Her second novel, published in 2000, Dying Voices, concerns a reluctant heiress and the death of her mother. The catch is her mother was kidnapped some twenty years previously and thought to have been murdered, but when a body is found and identified as being her mother, the death occurred only two days earlier. A shock for Dodie Blackstock several times over. She's been living a life of deceit that she didn't realize, and now everything she thought to be true and the normal life she has worked so hard at achieving is crumbling about her ears.
This is a story told in parallel. It moves back and forth in time between those disconcerting days when an eight-year-old Dodie must endure the kidnapping and subsequent ransom of her beautiful mother. Present day Dodie looks back at the crime with new eyes when she finds her mother has been alive all along. A mother who kept her name and phone number in her address book allowing for the police to contact her with the disturbing news. It all begins to come into sharp focus as she pieces together those events that took place in 1976, not so very long after the headlining news of Patty Hearst and the drama surrounding her own kidnapping scandal.
Dodie's childhood was not a particularly happy one and peppered with the sort of drama no child comes out of without a scar or two. Her father was an incredibly wealthy business man with a string of marriages and liaisons, the extent of which Dodie doesn't realize until much much later. Nothing she ever did was quite good enough and she lived in fear of his reprimands. Her mother, beautiful and gentle was never quite his match and the pressures of the marriage become apparent to Dodie only much later when she reflects back to her mother's peculiar behavior leading up to the kidnapping. When she is taken and ransom demanded her father refuses to pay--sure it is some ploy to extract money. He's not even sure his wife isn't in on the plot herself.
Things become increasingly messy and a botched police intervention puts an end to it--leaving several dead and no sign of the missing mother. Eventually she is declared deceased and Dodie is left on her own with a mostly absent father, a vapid stepmother. Her only saviors, if that is what they can be called, are a business partner of her father, a sympathetic man who keeps an eye out for the child and Joan who runs the household. Joan has been dedicated to her father and the family for as long as Dodie can remember.
But when she gets the phone call about her mother, Dodie is far away, leaving in London and trying to make a life for herself without the help of the family money. She has wanted nothing more than to lead a 'normal' life, not an easy thing for a child who never had a worry about anything and was not even sure how to navigate the real world. It took much trial and error to understand how to live an average life, and she is about to lose it all with the coming notoriety of the truth about her mother's life after the kidnapping as well as the events surrounding the crime.
This is a story that is well done and suspensefully told. You begin doubting everything, just as Dodie does. And then you begin wondering if you should also be doubting Dodie. It is a slow burn of a reveal as all the little secrets begin to come out and illuminate the truth--both from Dodie's childhood and now, to her mother's death. I previously read Hello, Bunny Alice, which also has a 1970s setting and which I liked equally as well. Maybe it is time to get acquainted with DI Ted Stratton!