#BookReview ‘She Lies Close’ by Sharon Doering

About the book…

A compulsive debut thriller about motherhood, obsession and how far we’d go to protect the ones we love.

Five-year-old Ava Boone has been missing for six months. There have been no leads, no arrests, no witnesses. The only suspect was quiet, middle-aged Leland Ernest.

And Grace Wright has just bought the house next door. Recently divorced, Grace uprooted her two small children to start again and hopes the move will reset her crippling insomnia. But now she understands bargain-price for her beautiful new house.

With whispered neighbourhood gossip and increasingly sleepless nights, Grace develops a fierce obsession with Leland and the safety of her children. Could she really be living next door to a child-kidnapper? A murderer?

With reality and dream blurring more each day, Grace desperately pursues the truth – following Ava’s family, demanding answers from the police – and then a body is discovered…

Enormous thanks to the epic Sarah Mather from Titan Books for the chance to read ‘She Lies Close’ which has rocketed into my Top 10 books of 2020. It is available now in paperback and ebook formats and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

The creeping and insidious sense of dread as you tear through the chapters looking for clues to what happened to Ava is juxtaposed with the sense that Grace is not the most reliable narrator. You are unsure whether your front row seat to her fragile hold on reality slipping borders voyeurism , and at the same time, her desperate need to keep her children, and by extension herself, safe, provides her with a moral core which eats away at your doubts.

Between societal expectations on the role of women as mothers, her own desires to be wanted and seen in her own right exists the gap where doubts creep in. Grace rages against what is expected of her, her failure to secure and keep a marriage afloat has erased her as a sexual being and left her as a referee to her children’s fights, battling to keep up her teacher persona when all she wants to do is sleep.

However, sleep holds no respite, insomnia becomes her closest friend and as reality and dreams begin to interweave, she becomes increasingly reckless in her investigation of neighbour Leland Ernest.

A casual comment by another neighbour, about Leland harrassing his teen daughter plants the seed in an already fractured psyche, and her concerns over her fitness to be a mother exacerbate her thought processes until she finds herself in perilous positions. She begins to haunt the internet and then the family of Ava Boone. She listens to all the talk in the staff room about Ava’s brother and begins to compile an image of herself as an avenging angel who wants to bring Ava home. Her lack of self worth is so tied up in her husband abandoning her and being unfaithful , that she finds the whole of Ava’s case occupying her every thought.

This can easily be reflected onto cases such as Madeleine McCann’s, the type of abduction with no conclusion which has led to endless speculation, blame and arm chair theorising which can easily turn into obsession. It;s such a touchstone for this character, it makes her painfully relatable as a mother, as a parent, would you ever stop looking?

Between her fugue state from sleeplessness and exhaustion and her public persona this case takes a hold and as a reader, you completely empathise with her. She is so raw, so vulnerable and so honest yet like any fallible human, she makes mistake after mistake until the discovery of a body flips everything she knew upside down.

In Grace, Sharon Doering has created the most believable picture of motherhood that I have read about in years. Her descriptions of how she interacts with her children, toddler Chloe and teen Wyatt, were an absolute attack on all senses and so damn accurate it hurts. She confronts the fine line between loving your children so much you want to inhale the air from their lungs, remember their scent, the feel of their sticky fingers and yet want to burn down the kitchen because it is the site of so many screaming matches and destruction. Her honesty and rawness on the dichotomy of mothering is incredibly real and takes your breath away. You want to say, ‘Yes, YES YOU GET IT!!!!’

A damning indictment on the state of modern motherhood, a searing insight into a vulnerable divorcee and a gripping thriller which opens and closes unlike any I have read before, this is an absolute belter of a book which , don’t tell my to read pile, I was uniformly unable to cheat on until I had finished ‘She Lies Close’. As a serial multiple-book-at-a-time reader, this is about the best praise I can give, it consumed ll my thinking, I had to slow down my reading because I wanted to absorb every detail and I did not want it to end, yet at the same time, I absolutely did want that finality. And boy, does Sharon deliver. My only regret is that she is a debut author and there will be some time to wait until her next novel arrives. But I will absolutely be there for it.

I don’t know if any of this makes any sense but please, if you are looking for a thriller with a slow burn and a blow your socks of punchline, this is the book for you. I’m off to have a lie down and breathe again, and if you have the ability to, reserve this at a local library, or put it on your book wish list. Damn, it’s a great book.

About the author…

Sharon Doering lives in the Chicago area with her husband, Marc, their three kids, and a peculiarly civilized dog, Indy.

In her other life, she was a science professor, a biotech stock analyst, and a xenotransplantation researcher. She has also been a good waitress, a mediocre bartender, and a terrible maid.

‘She Lies Close’ from Titan Books, is her first novel in the genre of domestic suspense

Links-http://www.sharondoering.com/

Twitter @SharonJDoering @TitanBooks