The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel by P.D. Viner
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is one of those books that is told out of sequence for showmanship.
and it works just fine, but books like these always make me wonder if they would lose some of their appeal if they were told chronologically—i wonder about the content-to-gimmick ratio. does the story hold up, or is it the dance where you are brought to the brink of discovery only to be swept back twenty years in time that gives it its strength?
it is a perfectly good psychological thriller, with all the seeecrets that i like, and the aftermath of emotional damage, and i was pleased with its serpentine ending, which had a little bit too much coincidence and contrivance, but when i am reading a mystery-thriller, this doesn’t bother me overmuch.
it is, as they say, a good read.
the short of it is this: dani lancing’s was found, violated and murdered. twenty years later, her loss and the mystery of her final days are still being felt by those who loved her. her parents have separated; her mother is obsessed with revenge, her father is haunted by the absence of the two women he loved, and tom, the young man who loved her, is now an older man who is still carrying a torch for her memory.
and everyone is feeling guilty.
dani was a girl with a whole lot of secrets, secrets we learn over the course of the book. some were known to her father, some to tom, very few to her mother. and these secrets, these cover-ups all contributed to the mystery surrounding her death. and as her mother desperately tries to get closure through vengeance, new crimes will be committed as a result, and things go sideways really quickly.
it’s a bit muddlesome, but it all works out in the end, storywise at least. it has one of those endings that is truly surprising and satisfying—like the end of that christopher pike trilogy that rocked my world as a young girl; the one that made me realize that there aren’t two possible endings to a mysterious death, but three. and it took three books to get there, and it blew my young-girl mind. this one is similar. there are twists and red herrings and new information and the slow reveal of backstory, and it all is very pleasing to the reader with the anticipation and staggery pacing.
the torch-carrying and pining got to me a little, though. both tom’s for dani and jim’s (her father) for patty. i get love, but i don’t get that endless yearning sustained for as long as it was by two different characters. particularly for tom, whose love is dead and buried, and especially considering that he knew what he knew. it just seems…unnatural. maybe i am just heartless, but i think things like that work perfectly well in melodrama, but in a more realistically-toned novel, it just seems unlikely.
but it’s good, i enjoyed reading it and it was a solid three-and-a-half for me. and maybe for you.
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