Only Truth

August 1, 2020
Cameron's debut follows a London painter whose husband insists on moving to the country as she realizes that "there's something not right with this place." Talk about understatements. Despite her modest professional success, Isabel Dryland-Weir had plenty of problems of her own before Tom Dryland fell in love with The Lodge. Ever since she suffered a traumatic brain injury more than 20 years ago, she's been prone to spells of disorientation and self-doubt, and she doesn't entirely trust her resistance to moving so far outside her comfort zone. The Lodge may have good bones, but it's in sore need of the renovation its former owner, Richard Connor, didn't undertake before he was moved to a care home with dementia. Even as she continues to wrestle with the demons from her past, Izzy unwillingly amasses evidence that the coach house of her new home may have been used to imprison someone years ago. When that evidence doesn't move the local police to action, she begins to make inquiries on her own, stirring up bad feelings among locals who have different but equally compelling reasons to let sleeping dogs lie and provoking one of them to kill her cat and a magpie in preparation for a shattering third act. In the meantime, Tom's infatuation with married neighbor Madeline Armstrong leaves Izzy alone just when she most needs a trusted companion. No wonder she reflects, "This place hates us, I can feel it." A deep plunge into a haunted psyche slowly stretched to the breaking point. More, please.

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August 10, 2020
At 15, Izzy Dryland-Weir, who narrates much of Cameron's debut, a tense psychological thriller, suffered a brain injury in an attack she remembers nothing about. Despite this trauma, Izzy becomes a successful painter. In 2011, she met her future husband, Tom Dryland, at the exclusive London gallery that handled her work. Now, four years into their marriage, Tom, who sees himself as Izzy’s caretaker and professes to know her better than she knows herself, insists that they leave London for the more tranquil countryside. She reluctantly agrees to move into a Victorian villa, which is disturbingly near where her attack occurred. This is one of many coincidences Izzy attributes to fate. Tom dismisses her growing sense of foreboding merely as a residual effect of her trauma from more than a decade earlier. As evidence mounts that Izzy’s fears are justified, she realizes that she alone must confront her past. Meanwhile, a sadistic killer closes in on his prey. Cameron slowly revs up the suspense to an exciting crescendo in this intriguing game of cat and mouse. Agent: Jane Gregory, David Higham Assoc. (U.K.). (Oct.)Correction: This book is the author's debut novel. A previous version of this review incorrectly attributed another book to the author.