The Night Following

Starred review from January 28, 2008
Distracted by the daffodil-flocked Wiltshire countryside speeding past her, or perhaps by the condom wrapper she has found in her husband's car, the unnamed doctor's wife plows into the doomed bicyclist—shattering several lives and launching a haunting journey that should burnish the reputation of Joss (Half Broken Things
, which won the CWA's Silver Dagger Award) as one of Britain's most original crafters of psychological suspense. The guilt-ridden hit-and-run driver becomes increasingly obsessed with the victim, recently retired English teacher Ruth Mitchell, and Ruth's devastated widower, Arthur. Providing emotional contrast are the notes Arthur leaves for Ruth and excerpts from The Cold and the Beauty and the Dark
, the slow-paced multigenerational saga Ruth was bringing to her writing group on the fateful day. As the narrator finds herself irresistibly drawn to the Mitchells' home, a nightly witness to Arthur's decline, boundaries begin to blur. Increasingly, her flashbacks to her own family history begin eerily to mirror the clan in Ruth's manuscript. But, Joss asks provocatively, who are any of us apart from the stories we choose to believe—those we create and those we appropriate?

January 1, 2008
Scottish mystery writer Joss (whose 2003 novel, Half Broken Things, won the UK Crime Writers Associations Silver Dagger Award and who writes the Sara Selkirk novels, set in Bath) has concocted a haunting psychological suspense tale here. Joss main vehicle for playing on readers nerves is the first-person narration of a woman who has just left the scene of a hit-and-run accident that seems to have left the victim, another woman, well and truly dead. The narrator was distracted after finding evidence that her husband was having an affair. This novel offers an extended meditation on the loss of the narrators marriage and the loss of the stranger she killed. Suspense comes from figuring out who the narrator is and how she is going to cope with her guilt and leave the periphery of life to which she has condemned herself. Joss is very like Ruth Rendell in the way she entices and disturbs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)