Book Review: The Liar's Diary by Patry Francis

By Patry Francis

Ali Mather, the new music teacher at Birdgeway High School, seems willing to break all the rules, and she becomes an unlikely friend to staightlaced and conservative narrator Jeanne Cross. But this is a tale of lies within lies, and Jeanne's perfect marriage begins to unravel as her friendship with Ali deepens and the dark secrets of Jeanne's husband and son are brought to the surface. The tragic interplay between truth and deception lead to tragedy, and eventually to murder.

Author Patry Francis constructs a powerful first-person narrative, relying heavily on the unspoken (and eventually tragic in the classical sense) flaws in the character of Jeanne Cross to provide the driving force in a story that is loaded with unexpected twists. The pacing is excellent. This book is definitely a hard one to put down once you're sucked in, and it is emotionally unrelenting all the way through to the final pages.

The details of the setting are convincingly New England. The fictional town of Bridgeway could be any one of dozens of small Massachusetts communities, places where appearances are kept up at all costs and small-town gossips wait in ambush eager for any taste of scandal. Francis creates vivid, memorable characters, colorful details, and weaves in a fascinating subtext of classical music as the shared interest between Ali and Jeanne.

This is not a murder mystery in the traditional sense, but the mystery elements present in the final third of the book are cleverly constructed with a good variety of possible suspects and motives. The final "big twist" didn't come off as smoothly as the author probably intended, but there were some absolutely wonderful plot twists along the road leading to that climax.

I did, in places, find myself on the verge of losing patience with narrator Jeanne, who obliviously makes one bad decision after another, but this was a necessary element, as it is Jeanne's tragic flaws that propel the story.

Patry Francis is a local author here on Cape Cod, and this was her debut novel. Patry, of course, is also a regular here on Gather.

The Liar's Diary was book #10 in my goal of reading and reviewing 50 books in 2008.