Lying in Wait

"Liz Nugent is absolutely brilliant at monstrous characters. She puts us right inside their heads and we’re both fascinated and appalled by them. We might consider them psychopaths, although Nugent is careful never to label them herself. We watch with a kind of gleeful, hand-over-mouth horror as they wreak damage on the people around them, without any kind of self-awareness. I just love them. The main character in this book is Lydia Fitzsimmons. She’s the wife of a judge and she seems to have this perfect life, living in a beautiful house with her husband and son, but she is actually a complete monster. “At heart, the genre is about what it is to be human and to interact with other humans and about the fears that we all have” The book has the greatest first line of any psychological thriller, which is: “My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it.” That sets the tone for the whole book. Lydia’s husband, the judge, has killed a sex worker and together they bury the body in the garden. Her son, whom she adores but towards whom she is overbearing and controlling, discovers the body and becomes obsessed with finding out who the dead girl is, inveigling himself into her family life. In one sense the book is about the murder, but mostly it’s about this toxic woman and what she does to her family and the lengths she’ll go to to keep her family under her control. She medicates her son to keep him fat so that he won’t leave her. She’s just so monstrous but so compelling at the same time, just a brilliant creation. We gradually find out about her childhood. She was adored by her father and always kept like a princess. So, she’s always thought that the world owes her that for her entire life. There’s no need for a big twist, with this book it’s more about the piling on of these terrible things that this woman does and says, the piling on of the tension and how torn we are between wanting her to get her comeuppance, but at the same time wanting to carry on watching her."