Olivia Dumont is a ghostwriter, but a public spat with another writer has left her career in ruins. Her luck changes when acclaimed horror author Vincent Taylor requests Olivia to ghostwrite his memoirs. This isn’t just any life story, though. Vincent’s siblings were murdered in 1975 and he was the prime suspect.
After 50 years of silence, Vincent wants to tell the truth about what happened, but time is running out. He has Lewy body dementia and his memories are fading fast. Olivia reluctantly accepts the offer because she needs the money. However, she keeps one crucial detail from her boyfriend and agent. Olivia is Vincent Taylor’s estranged daughter and has spent her entire professional life hiding it.
It’s 20 years since they last spoke. As a child, he designed treasure hunts for her, games filled with clues, prizes and fun. But as he became famous, dazzling the literary world, the once-loving father transformed into an egocentric addict who constantly let his daughter down. Writing his memoirs presents an opportunity for Olivia to find closure, and to learn more about her family; who they were, and what made them the people they’ve become.
The father Olivia finds is a stranger. The charismatic, larger-than-life Vincent Taylor is gone, replaced by someone she barely recognises. He’s fearful, easily confused, paranoid and prone to inexplicable bursts of anger. Navigating his fragile memories without upsetting him proves to be a significant challenge. Olivia feels like a passenger in a car driven by someone with no control, simply waiting for it to crash.
Can Olivia trust her father’s account of what happened that hot night in June 1975? Vincent was 16 and went out while his parents attended a summer carnival. When they arrived home, 18-year-old Danny and 14-year-old Poppy were dead. It was Vincent who found his siblings brutally murdered, and he became the prime suspect. Apparently, before the deaths, the brothers were constantly fighting, with Vincent once pulling a knife on Danny.
The narrative reveals both sides of the story. Vincent then was the loner, the family outsider, while Danny was the popular one. Danny enjoyed taunting his brother, saying things to upset him to get a reaction. Nonetheless, Vincent had an alibi. He was with his girlfriend, Lydia, and their next-door neighbour, a school teacher, at the time of the murders.
Finding the truth is made near-impossible by Vincent’s contradictory accounts but Olivia is not allowed to talk to any other sources. However, she comes across some spools of film which were shot by Poppy, an aspiring filmmaker and feminist who wanted to capture everything on film so people would believe her about her brothers fighting and her mother’s drinking. When she unintentionally filmed something she shouldn’t have, Poppy hid the recordings.
Julie Clark uses dual timelines to draw us into this dysfunctional family drama, shifting between Ojai, California in the 1970s and the present day. She employs a variety of perspectives, including excerpts from Poppy’s diaries and the footage filmed prior to the killings.
Poppy’s voice is tangible and clear, with words on paper and visual evidence on film, whereas Vincent’s depiction of events is exceedingly muddled. He’s an unreliable narrator, but we don’t know whether this is due to his condition or if it’s deliberate. This uncertainty puts us on uneven footing, naturally creating a sense of unease and tension, something the author excels at.
The plot is driven by Olivia’s search for the truth behind the unsolved double homicide. More crucially, The Ghostwriter centres on a troubled father-daughter relationship, rebuilding damaged connections under difficult circumstances, and working through decades of trauma. It also highlights the fluidity of memories and how subjective they can be, easily manipulated to suit our needs.
Reading a novel with authors as central subjects is always interesting. Sometimes, famous writers become detectives as a bit of fun to catch our attention. But Julie Clark has adopted a more authentic approach. Both main characters could just as easily have been psychologists, artists or plumbers. What keeps us reading is simply good storytelling without superfluous add-ons.
Also see The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentil.
Source Books
Print/Kindle/iBook
£9.97
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
