The Dead Lie Down, a psychological thriller by Sophie Hannah set in the fringes of the British art world, will keep you turning pages looking for all kinds of answers, the least of which may well be who done it. The book has a plot much more complicated than that. It all begins with a confession to a murder that doesn't seem to have happened, since the supposed victim is patently still alive. One character after another is haunted by all sorts of unexplained mysteries from the past. Indeed, the reader will have to get well into the novel, before the question of who done it even becomes relevant. And it is no mean feat that Hannah keeps you reading until it does.
There are five major characters in the novel, each one seemingly crazier than the other, or if not crazy, at least strange. There are two law officers, Simon Waterhouse a somewhat repressed Momma's boy who takes out his frustrations on his friends and colleagues. He is engaged to Sergeant Charlotte "Charlie" Zailer, who has resigned from her position as a DC to become a community liaison officer because of some past snafu that is hinted at and alluded to but not ever explained in detail, presumably because it has been the subject of a prior book. Either you're a Hannah lover, and you already know all about it, or else you're a potential reader, and it wouldn't do to give the plot away. All Charlie's actions are colored by her fear that everyone looks at her as a screw up.
Ruth Bussey also has been involved in something she is ashamed of, something so bad she has moved away from her home to a new city and even at times thinks of suicide, but, as with Charlie, she doesn't seem to want to tell the reader about it. In her new home, she begins to cope with life again through a rather sudden interest in art. She gets a job in first in a gallery and then with a framer after she has a run-in with one of the gallery's customers. Aiden Seek is the framer. They fall in love, and in a night of confessions, where they have agreed not to ask each other any questions about what they reveal, she tells him that she has done something bad in her past, and he tells her that he has killed a woman.
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