REVIEW: LYING IN WAIT, BY LIZ NUGENT

 

My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it.

On the surface, Lydia Fitzsimons has the perfect life—wife of a respected, successful judge, mother to a beloved son, mistress of a beautiful house in Dublin. That beautiful house, however, holds a secret. And when Lydia’s son, Laurence, discovers its secret, wheels are set in motion that lead to an increasingly claustrophobic and devastatingly dark climax.

 

My Thoughts: Lying in Wait has been described as “seductively sinister,” and from the very first page, we become aware of the strangely dark voice of Lydia Fitzsimons, wife to the judge and mother to her only son Laurence. Lydia is one of those narcissistic women who is primarily focused on herself and her needs, and her apparent overwhelming love for son Laurence is really more about what she needs from him. When her darkness turns pathological, she becomes an interesting study in mental illness.

Her husband Andrew didn’t stand a chance. His poor choices were all about serving her needs, too, and those would come back to haunt him.

The intersecting lives of Andrew, Lydia, and Laurence with Annie Doyle, her sister Karen, and her parents have their twisted origins in one dreadful night when everything went out of control.

But then we learn that way back in the past, Lydia’s true colors showed themselves at a tragic event when she was nine years old.

Would Laurence be able to extricate himself from the grasping control of his mother? Could he continue to bury the secret that was lying in wait to come out? Or would his mother’s twisted needs turn everything upside down?

Set in Dublin in the 1980s, the story immediately hooked me, with the dark and disturbing characters and their secrets; I couldn’t stop turning the pages, loving every minute with them all, curiously wondering how it would all end. 5 stars.***My e-ARC came from the publishers via NetGalley.