Gripping tale despite dubious details
Published Saturday June 27th, 2009
In Lisa Unger's Die For You, the devil is in the details. "Lies lived in the little things, the details people threw in to make their stories sound truer," muses a police detective during an interrogation. Indeed, some of the details Unger throws in to make her own story sound truer are what trips it up.
Die For You is the latest mystery from the bestselling author. Her heroine, Isabel Raine, writes bestselling books, too. She ends up living one when her husband disappears and she chases his story around New York and Prague to find out where and who he is. Fueled by rage and a desperation for the truth, she picks clues off corpses and races to write her own ending before someone else does it for her. The story is engaging and well-paced, and despite a cloying dessert of an ending, it reads smoothly and satisfyingly, despite a few stumbles over the details.
The detectives are nicely drawn characters, flawed and likable instead of stale cop caricatures, but Isabel Raine is too self-conscious a narrator. She's so convinced of her own importance that it makes it hard to empathize with her.
"I'm not most people," she keeps saying to anyone who will listen and, although she does demonstrate a fiery spirit, for me, it is doused by her arrogance.
Is it Unger's mistake, or her heroine's, when the contents of a purse keep changing, or when a character with an empty fridge instantly puts together a tuna melt? If Unger wants us to pay attention to the details she should be consistent with what she offers.
Unger also shows evidence of a distracting literary tic. Her characters are always talking about feelings in their "centres": "a hole in my centre,-a fire in my centre." The word "centre" appears often enough to have the same jarring effect as a sudden bad accent in an otherwise absorbing film.
On the other hand, Unger's prose can take surprising and beautiful turns. Her illustrations of marriage are particularly poignant.
"I couldn't have those words written between us, alive and gnawing at our marriage like rats in the attic," she writes.
"My mother closed her lavender-shadowed lids, then opened them slowly. It was something she did to show us she was summoning her patience. She gave me the lids, our father would say."
Die For You is also flecked with sharp social commentary. A male detective astutely observes that "American women had been sold a concept that had failed them miserably ... (to) just try to take up as little space as possible, be as small as possible, or you will be reviled and ridiculed by every industry posed to make a dime off you "¦"
Unger has a keen sense of place, and cities are characters rather than merely settings. Isabel acts as our New York City tour guide while she hunts for her husband, dropping tidbits about boroughs and boulevards along the way. Unger also captures well the mystery and isolation of Prague:
"No one dreamed of Prague the way they did Paris. Paris glittered and danced for her audience, had already lifted her skirts and offered her treasures to the world. Prague still stood in the wings, holding herself aloof, offering nothing but coy glimpses of her perfection."
Die For You is a gripping journey of grief, betrayal and forgiveness. And in the end, the ride is exciting enough to render the dents in the details forgivable.
At least that's what my centre is telling me.
Rebecca Higgins is a writer, social worker and teacher living in Fredericton.
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