Losing Nicola

April 18, 2011
Moody (Dummy Hand and five other Cassie Swann bridge mysteries) deftly captures austere post-WWII England in this subtle, somber stand-alone. Seven-year-old Alice and eight-year-old Orlando have settled with their large extended family in roomy Glenfield House in Shale, a small town on the Kent coast. The years pass happily enough for the children, until their final summer in Shale when, the day after Alice's 12th birthday party, Alice and Orlando discover the battered body of Nicola, a girl two or three years older than Alice, in a lonely glade. The bewitching Nicola was the daughter of one of Glenfield's paying guests, a divorced woman from London. Twenty years later, a recently divorced Alice returns to Shale, where she begins to piece together events of that summer and must face the possibility that her beloved Orlando is a murderer. Moody skillfully brings her characters to life, especially the emotionally wounded Alice, who slowly progresses toward healing. Martha Grimes fans should be pleased.

April 15, 2011

Twenty years after her 12th birthday ended in tragedy, Alice Beecham returns to her hometown in an attempt to make herself whole by figuring out what happened.

The summer of 1953 may have been uneventful for the world at large, but it was crucial for history teacher Fiona Beecham and her brood, who in the absence of their soldier husband and father have found a home with Fiona's aunt in Shale, a town in coastal Kent. Even though nobody exactly liked 13-year-old Nicola Stone, nobody could resist her either. An arresting backstory—her father was doing time for strangling her friend Valerie Johnson two years earlier—combined with her sovereign impertinence and her budding sexuality to make her irresistible to the local lads, from Julian Tavistock to Alice's all-but-twin Orlando, and those a bit older but no wiser, especially art teacher Bertram Yelland. As Alice struggles with unfamiliar and uncomfortable feelings for Sasha Elias, the piano teacher whose family was killed in the Holocaust, Nicola adroitly manages to affront every adult in Shale while remaining the alpha child in Alice's circle. Her reign of terror ends when Orlando and Alice, picking blackberries the morning after Nicola's rudeness spoiled Alice's party the day before, find her beaten to death. When the passing years fail to bring resolution to the mystery of her death Alice resolves to mark the breakup of her marriage by resettling in Shale long enough to interview everyone concerned. She soon learns that despite their ritual reluctance, they're more than willing to talk about the secrets they've hidden all these years.

Veteran Moody (Doubled in Spades, 1997, etc.) spins a puzzle that takes a back seat to her graceful evocation of her heroine's childhood and its disintegration one fateful summer.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2011
Set in England following the end of World War II, Moodys novel begins when 11-year-old Alice and her brother, Orlando, move with their parents to the small coastal town of Shale. Although the family is poor, they have books, music, seaside adventures, and plenty of friends to make things bearable. But their placid life is shattered when 12-year-old Nicola Stone moves to town. Alice is intrigued by Nicolas sophisticated, knowing precociousness, but Orlando hates her. Its only after weeks of Nicolas thoughtless cruelty and taunting innuendos that Alice begins to hate her, too. On the night of Alices twelfth birthday party, Nicola disappears, and its Alice and Orlando who find her battered body the next day. Nicolas killer is never found, but her brutal murder haunts Alice and Orlando into adulthood. Alice, who is more affected by the tragedy than Orlando, decides to move back to Shale, try to discover who killed Nicola, and thus try to exorcise her own demons. This dark, atmospheric novel combines a gripping murder mystery and a psychologically complex coming-of-age tale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)