I think about a quote I read once in a letter written by one of my favourite authors, Charlotte Brontë. ‘I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends.’ I wonder if that includes family members too.
What Lies Between Us
by John Marrs
Genre: Thriller
About: Maggie watches her neighbours from the attic window. They can't see her, no one has seen her for the last two years, except her daughter - the one with the key to her chain. But Nina has her reasons for locking her mother up, only she still doesn't know all of the truth. There are some lies Maggie must keep to herself. Some truths her daughter must never find out...
Thoughts
John Marrs creates such great hooks. This has dual POV and dual timeline and the way he bats from one to the other makes you desperate to know more. What did Maggie do? What does Nina know? Will Maggie escape? Should Maggie escape?! The journey to the truth is gripping as the more you discover, the more effed up the family history becomes. Although that shouldn't be much of a shock as the book does open up with Maggie imprisoned in the attic by her daughter, Nina - who likes to have family meals with her every other day. It's twisted from the start and only gets darker.
The lies are particularly good. There are a lot and the ones Maggie tells fitted in really well with her character. All of her actions make sense as we grow to understand her and her motivations. I liked a lot of the characters - in the sense of how well developed they were - but Maggie was probably my favourite. I felt like I really understood her by the end.
Nina's character did seem to suffer from some of the twists. I really liked the dynamic between her and Maggie, and Nina's voice was strong - up until a point. Then it leaned hard into the melodrama and her twists, at least for me, mostly opened up plot holes.
-Spoiler section-
It's suggested that Nina is suffering from dissociative identity disorder, but the traumatic event the twist reveals is not that her father abused her, but that he told her he was leaving them for another woman. He comforts her and tells her that he still loves her, but that he has to leave. A horrible thing to discover. But is it deeply traumatic? Or triggering enough for a thirteen year old to become a killer?
Also why does the dad lie to Maggie when she confronts him? He's just told his daughter the truth, why not his wife? And why does the woman he's having an affair with never come knocking on Maggie's door after he goes missing? He was going to leave his family for her, wouldn't she get in contact with them when she learns he's missing?
I also didn't understand what Maggie meant at the end when she said she believes that Nina is present when she kills. If she was present when she killed her father, in the same way she was present when she attacks her son, then how much does she remember? She seems to remember that her son was going to leave, hence why she chains him up, but why doesn't she remember that her father was going to leave?
How does Dylan/Bobby remain missing for ten months? His mother literally meets Nina at her birthday party and sees how inappropriate she is with her son. For him to go missing so shortly afterwards would surely warrant more than one visit from the police. Especially given her behaviour to his boyfriend.
Why did the neighbour - who knew Nina killed her father at the age of thirteen and has a lot of mental health problems, not check up on her story about her mother? She was a close friend of Maggie's and she doesn't contact Maggie's sister to confirm she is in fact being taken care of over there? Simply watching Nina and 'waiting for her to slip up' over a two year period didn't make sense given how much she knew about Nina.
-End of spoiler section-
Overall, I loved the writing, the pace, the characters. Some of the twists worked for me, others did not, but the ending is most certainly memorable.
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