Book Review Robert Wiersema THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR by Shari Lapena The Couple Next Door, the debut suspense novel from writer Shari Lapena, begins with a moment of domestic immediacy: Marco and Anne Conti are at a dinner party with their neighbours Cynthia and Graham, and Anne wants to go home. Six months after the birth of their daughter Cora, Anne is feeling angry, insecure and resentful, slightly drunk and concerned with the amount of flirting Cynthia is doing with Marco. They’ve left Cora at home in her crib, just on the other side of the wall of the row house, checking her regularly and listening in on the baby monitor, reasoning that they’re almost as close as they would be if they were at home. It makes perfect sense. Or it seems to until, at the one a.m. check, Anne discovers that Cora is missing, taken from her crib while her parents were next door. It’s the stuff of nightmares, and a propulsive start to what quickly becomes a compelling thriller. When the police are called, the seeming normalcy of Marco and Anne’s life quickly begins to shred. Anne, it seems, suffers not only frompost-partumdepression (severe enough that Marco has researched it online), but also has a history of mental illness. Marco’s business is suffering, to the point of desperation. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Was Cora taken by a stranger, or did something terrible happen in the house? Is it a kidnapping, or a coverup? The further the investigation proceeds, the more secrets are revealed, and the more the plot twists in on itself. With The Couple Next Door, Lapena – who lives in Toronto and worked as a lawyer and an English teacher before turning to fiction – embraces both the standard tropes of a mystery and the au courant elements of domestic suspense to create a page-turner of a novel. There’s the gruff, longtime cop who has seen too much and suspects everyone, and the fraught relationship between Marco and his in-laws, who have looked down on him since the beginning. There are ransom calls and psychological histories, forensic tests and shocking twists. It all combines to create something almost comfortingly familiar, but novel enough to succeed on its own merits. Lapena writes with a lean, terse prose, not minimalist at all, but rarely giving more than the scene needs to move forward. There’s no lingering over description, no superfluous internal monologues. This muscularity, combined with effortless shifts between the major characters, serves to both propel the narrative and to create a sense of discomfort and uncertainty in the reader, perfect for this sort of book. This uncertainty is compounded by her gradual revelation of the internal lives of the characters; the focus may be close on a particular character in any given section, but it is evident that they are holding back, that we’re seeing only the presentable, public sides of their lives. At least at first. By now, readers will be familiar with novels such as Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Shari Lapena’s The Couple Next Door is a worthy addition to that canon, but with an impressive and important shift. Unlike those other books, there is an innocent victim involved in The Couple Next Door, and Cora’s ultimate fate raises the stakes above and beyond those of the core characters. This lends a greater gravitas to the novel, while at the same time allowing – if not forcing – the reader to treat the main characters with suspicion. Rather than endearing themselves to us, we find ourselves, like Rasbach the police detective, less concerned with their feelings than we are with what happened to their daughter, our investigative instincts flaring, our suspicions honed. It’s a welcome change, and a powerful experience. 54 | www.snowbirds.org
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