You’re a single mom in a murder mystery whose little boy says a man in a black mask comes down from the attic in the middle of the night and breathes in his face — would you believe him? Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * You’re a single mom in a murder mystery whose little boy says a man in a black mask comes down from the attic in the middle of the night and breathes in his face — would you believe him? Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? You’re a single mom in a murder mystery whose little boy says a man in a black mask comes down from the attic in the middle of the night and breathes in his face — would you believe him? Well, that’s a creepy scenario. We readers would believe the little boy because in the opening pages we’ve already seen Anya lolling in her bath, emptying a bottle of wine, while up in her attic a man in a black mask — well, you can guess. Needless to say, Anya is not long for this world in Andrea Mara’s .
Meabh Fitzpatrick photo Ireland’s Andrea Mara has written seven crime novels; Someone in the Attic is the first to be released in North America. Mara is one of Ireland’s better-known mystery writers; is her first to be published in North America. And pretty good it is too, though a tad too complex.
If it has you hearing things in your house at 3 a.m., the book has done its job.
Anya had been the narcissistic ringleader of a group of young women in Dublin 20 years before, a cliché crew that included Julia, Eleanor and Donna. Three of them are rich and planned to meet up for wine in Dublin, and Donna..
. well, Donna we hear about here and there, just enough to clue us in that she’s dead, and the stuff of a nasty shared secret the other three have carefully hidden. Anya, it goes without saying, doesn’t make the wine date.
Julia becomes our story’s focus, just moved back to Dublin rather suddenly from San Diego, along with daughter Isla, son Luca and, quite weirdly still hanging around, her ex Gabe, who’s a cad. They all had to skedaddle from San Diego because..
. because, well, Julia and Gabe aren’t really letting us know why, but it had something to do with something awful that Isla did, which is yet another secret still to be divulged — and it was ghastly. Mara wants us to like Julia, whose job is to look at the personnel within a company and advise the bosses which individuals to lay off.
What your book club thinks of Julia could depend on how many CEOs and how many union members are in your club. Seems there’s a TikTok craze in which people dress up in black and descend from their attics acting, like, totally menacing. To cut to the chase, some new such videos show up on Isla’s phone, and (brace yourselves) they’ve been filmed in Julia’s house.
Luca is soon claiming that there’s a man in the attic who comes down during the night dressed all in black and creeps into his bedroom, the floorboards overhead creaking, the door hatch and ladder squeaking, a medicinal smell permeating through the black mask as Luca desperately pretends to be asleep. No one’s in the attic when they check, of course, just undisturbed dust showing no tracks, no evidence anyone has been up there. Yet the videos continue, each becoming more intrusive, more invasive and things around the house begin disappearing or getting moved mysteriously.
Luca’s pet rabbit, of course, can be counted on to brush against a bare ankle at the scariest moment. relies heavily on the slow reveal of the book’s secrets, which soon also include abundant secrets held by Julia’s neighbours and people we haven’t yet met who may have a grudge. Julia and Eleanor, meanwhile, begin to have doubts that Anya was so drunk that she drowned in the bath.
Someone in the Attic Turns out Gabe has lots of secrets, though what he’s hiding is tantalizingly unknown to us...
and maybe Gabe isn’t the only one playing away from home. Like many books of this type, married people are happily having sex with each other, though the coupling couples don’t happen to be married to each other. An ultrasound scan pops up, and assumptions are made about who’s begatting out of wedlock with whom.
The intrigue mounts. Monday mornings The latest local business news and a lookahead to the coming week. Julia tries to piece together who may be invading her family’s privacy.
She suddenly reckons she’s put it together. Has she? Spoiler alert: that would leave more than 100 pages to go. Then she’s spotted the fiend for sure.
Or maybe she’s wrong again. is a right enough thriller. Readers could be forgiven for yelling at Julia to install some security cameras inside the house or leave her bedroom door open at night, or even spend the night with Luca to see what happens.
Or go to a hotel. For once, a murder mystery could do with one or two fewer secrets. Only Luca seems not to be hiding anything shameful, though possibly his rabbit is similarly innocent — although we can never be sure what that twitching nose is hiding.
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin worried that the villain would hurt the rabbit, but fortunately no one was splitting hares. Someone in the Attic: A Novel By Andrea Mara Doubleday Canada, 368 pages, $25 Advertisement Advertisement.
