Standards are surely slipping in suburbia when murder is allowed to interrupt wine o’clock. It’s a particularly thorny issue for the now terminally misanthropic Beth, who has been relying on the support of her old friend vino since the death of her actual friend, Charlotte, around a year ago. Charlotte died after being hit by a car while out for a nighttime run, an incident that was quickly deemed a tragic accident by both the authorities and Charlotte’s friends and family.
While Charlotte’s untimely death has been a tragedy for the whole community – she was a marathon-running, charity-fundraising, well-respected A&E doctor who also ran the PTA and found time to dress up as the school’s Easter bunny, after all – Beth has been left especially bereft. And her emotional state has not been helped by her husband choosing the day after Charlotte’s death as the day to announce his affair and his intention to leave Beth and shack up with her (former) friend, Jade. It’s enough to turn anyone to drink.
It’s little wonder that time has passed in a bit of a blur for Beth since then. However, the start of a new school year brings a rare moment of clarity and a startling revelation for Beth. Indeed, a playground encounter with her frenemies reveals that Charlotte’s youngest son was left alone in the house on the night she supposedly went for the fateful run. Beth knows that there is no way Charlotte – a true supermum – would have left her son home alone. Not to go for a run. Not for anything.
But if Charlotte didn’t leave the house voluntarily on the night in question, is it really safe to assume that her death was an accident? How likely is it really that she would have run into the road in the dark without first checking for traffic? Beth begins to suspect that she’s been too blinded by grief and rage and a whole host of other emotions to recognise that there was something very wrong about Charlotte’s death. Determined to correct her mistake, Beth decides to dedicate her limited child-free time to detective work.
The Dead Friend Project is another superb blend of dark humour and intriguing mystery from Joanna Wallace. Subverting and exposing the thoroughly middle-class setting of a dormitory town somewhere outside of Oxford – where everyone is entirely respectable and everything is meticulously ordered and organised – by portraying it through the eyes of a jaded, miserable and often drunk resident is a masterstroke. Even without the possibility of murder, it’s clear that people would much rather problems simply disappear.
And Beth has certainly become a problem.
In addition to the drinking, she’s too loud, she swears too much, she asks awkward questions and she just can’t bear to pretend that everything is fine and the minutia of child-centric daily life are all-important. Wallace skewers many of the stereotypes of the competitive school mum clique, both through Beth’s acerbic and/or confused contributions to conversations and through her gloriously irritated internal monologue. It’s becoming clear that she’s an embarrassment to the other mums but also that they might be hiding something far more sinister than snobbery.
But is that what her former friends really think or is it Beth’s self-doubt and self-loathing speaking? While Emily and her Pritt Stick-loving posse are overly precious and somewhat consumed with preserving their social standing, meaning that Beth’s witty observations are often accurate, she’s still the epitome of an unreliable narrator. She’s so addled by unhappiness that she can’t always see people’s true character. Plus, her drinking causes memory lapses, which means she can’t be sure of what happened in the past or is happening in the present.
Memory issues are far from helpful for a sleuth, whether amateur or professional, but Beth is aware of her issues and perseveres despite them. She’s quite admirably determined in fact, and she’s far from the first literary detective to be their own worst enemy. As sober Beth can only remember fragments of what drunk Beth discovers, and given that those memories are questionable at best, there’s a constantly shifting set of clues and suspects, which renders the mystery twisted and largely unguessable.
While the majority of The Dead Friend Project is set in the present day as Beth attempts to unravel the puzzle behind Charlotte’s death and stop her own life from imploding, there are scenes from the past – from around the time of the incident – interspersed throughout. These scenes provide glimpses into Beth’s life before her best friend died and her husband left her, indicating that she might have been troubled even before tragedy struck, and they also flesh out events and characters that she has difficulty remembering or describing accurately.
Through highlighting the sinister side of the most mundane things and allowing Beth to clearheadedly observe the eccentricities and oddness of those around her, Wallace manages to make even playdates and school fetes seem macabre. The disorientation associated with Beth’s memory lapses exacerbates the confusion related to grief and the flailing need to find someone to blame. Together, these aspects result in an atmosphere of tension and danger that permeates The Dead Friend Project even as the gallows humour flows thick and fast.
Be sure to also check out Joanna Wallace’s award-winning debut crime novel, You’d Look Better as a Ghost.
Viper
Print/Kindle
£7.49
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
