The Wrong Girl by Laura Wilson.

 The Wrong Girl by Laura Wilson.

"Everything was in a mess. She's been left in this horrible room because she was the wrong girl. She wasn't good enough to be Phoebe or have a mum like Melissa. Of course she wasn't. How could she ever have thought she was?"

We can all sympathise with being in the wrong place at the wrong time can't we? But imagine having the wrong life and being the wrong person? Does that make any sense? Once you've worked through the complexities of this plot with these dysfunctional characters that all seem to have fragile egos appearing to be very unstable and grossly unhappy it should make sense. This is typical of Guardian crime reviewer, Laura Wilson and this one is certainly worthy of your time.

Wilson reminds us throughout that whatever actions we have taken in the past, they will always come back to haunt us. Guilt unfortunately, may define us, so how do we choose the guilt we can live with and repress it as long as we struggle through day to day living? Can we ever escape the burdens and actions of the past? Probably not.

The Prologue intrigues us with a Mr Fix-it, alias mystery man, sounding dejected and suicidal. "Everything had gone wrong too many times." Our mystery man was a roadie in the past, forty years back. He refers to a missing child and inevitably, his inability to be able to bring back the child. Sounds ominous, doesn't it? We are also told that there is a mystery surrounding his parentage and of course, his identity. It's what he refers to as knowing and not knowing like honesty or lying, something that alcoholics do and he should know. Mystery man was on a mission to retrace the past, to visit a man from the 60s and find out answers but he was running out of time. He also wanted to protect Molly.

Molly Armitage is Suzie's daughter. Mother, daughter and Tom had been staying at the Old Rectory in Repshall with Dan Carthy Todd. Dan was 66 when he dies suddenly. Ten year old Molly discovered his waxwork like form and this gave her nightmares that he would come back to haunt her. Suzie phones Janice, Dan's sister who also happens to be her birth mother that she has not had contact with in over 44 years. Janice was pregnant at 19 and was persuaded by her parents to have the child adopted. Two marriages, short-lived, ending in divorce, left her financially comfortable with properties in Notting Hill Gate and Suffolk which allowed her to travel extensively and enjoy an affluent lifestyle.

Janice had grown apart from Dan. He had moved back to his parents' home in Norfolk to look after them whilst the sister enjoyed a carefree, more hedonistic type of existence and after their deaths, he remained in modest surroundings as an odd-job man, helping where help was needed. The last time Janice had seen Dan was in 2008, for Ma's funeral.

Receiving the phone call from her one and only daughter proved too much. Throughout the novel Janice constantly reflects on abandoning her child and tries to explain to a fragile, unstable Suzie how she has always been haunted by this action. The wrong action. We are told that Janice always seems to be self-centred and controlled. Through life's tribulations she hasn't shed a tear and as readers, we don't feel sympathetic towards her. Meeting her middle-aged daughter and two grand-children overwhelms her, especially when Dan has just died and she has to arrange a funeral. Suzie carries feelings of anger and hatred towards her: "If you'd really loved me, you wouldn't have let me go. Then how could you do it?" A difficult one to answer. Understandably, having to confront her demons turns her into a blubbering wreck.

We are taken back to the swinging 60s, with rock stars and gigs and days of tripping. For Janice it was meant to be a time of sexual liberation and freedom. "Everyone got stoned." She had a fling with Jeff and then a more serious one with Joe: "Joe was a rock star, and they were expected to take drugs and be crazy." She called herself his ex-girlfriend or groupie believing the relationship was real: it was "something real, something that formed part of who she was." His sister Marie had been killed at a young age and this has had a profound effect on him. "Ribbons in the Wind" was probably dedicated to his sister. Drugs ruined his career and he was kicked out from the Weather Ship where he became a recluse, suffering a breakdown and having to seek psychiatric help. His existence was Spartan compared to his glamorous days as a rock and roll star, no heroism and nothing spectacular. Tributes were still being left outside his home, close to Dan's. Always remembered.

Molly bears a striking resemblance to a projected image of Phoebe Piper, a girl who has been missing for seven years. She discovers a letter left by Dan to Joe with two photos, in his garden shed and is convinced that she is Phoebe and not Molly. She keeps a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings relating to Phoebe's disappearance and becomes mortified when she reads that the Pipers are divorcing.

"Not being able to catch up with the life you were supposed to have was a lot worse than coming last in the sack race, because if you couldn't do that, then you'd never be able to belong anywhere."

A reference to Joe and a ribbon seemed crucial for Molly's adopting her new life as the right girl otherwise "she'd be the wrong girl for the rest of her life and she'd never ever be happy." She was suspicious when Janice arrived in Norfolk and would not accept her as a grandmother. Within a short space of time, Molly goes missing, leaving Suzie bereft and Janice feeling useless, at odds with the daughter she needs forgiveness from. What are they going to do?

We are told about the Sneaky Man also known as the Catweazle, obsessed with Joe who lives in the woods. Mark, Suzie's boyfriend discovers a corpse which he assumes belongs to this man. We soon discover the darker side of the swinging 60s, Magic Malc, Malcolm Devlin, who used to supply magical substances to the 60s rock scene, completely mad and dangerous. In time, Janice learns to connect the 1967 picnic scene when she was tripping with the rock band with a disappearance of another girl, Lisa Wynn. Some grisly discoveries shake Janice's awareness of those carefree days: "freedom was an illusion, and all of it meaningless."  The story contains so many twists and turns to engage your interest throughout. Enjoy.

Crimesquad endorsed it with the following: It's a "gripping drama..{with} emotional depth, a claustrophobic feeling of impending maleficence..a cracking good mystery at its dark heart."
The Book Bag added: Wilson has created "brilliant characters built layer by layer and a plot which comes ingeniously together."
John Williams, reviewer Mail on Sunday described the novel as being "thoughtful, scary and true, reminiscent of Barbara Vine at her best."

Publisher: Quercus Publishing Ltd.   ISBN: 978-1-78206-312-4.

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

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