A Line of Blood

July 6, 2015
Set in London, British TV producer McPherson’s slick suspense debut offers no psychological insights. When Alex Mercer and his 11-year-old son, Max, go chasing after their cat, they find their next-door neighbor, Mr. Bryce, electrocuted by an iron in the bathtub. Is it a suicide or a homicide? A short while before this discovery, Alex’s wife, Millicent, lost a daughter in utero. In the aftermath, Max suffered extreme signs of anxiety, would not allow his mother near him and had to see a psychiatrist. Once he stabilized, Millicent refused to deal with or talk about her feelings, disappearing for long periods, not functioning as a wife or a mother and burying herself in her work. Alex fears that the impact of finding the body may cause Max to regress. When a bracelet of Millicent’s turns up in Bryce’s house, both husband and wife fall under suspicion for murder. The simple, linear plot builds to a predictable and unsatisfying ending. Agent: Judith Murray, Greene & Heaton Literary Agency (U.K.).

June 15, 2015

Mercer and his 11-year-old son, Max, enter their next-door neighbor's house in North London, where they find the man, who lives alone, dead in his bathtub with an iron submerged between his legs. Suicide by electrocution, thinks Alex, but police believe otherwise. The immediate concern of Alex and Millicent, his American-born wife, is protecting Max from the trauma of having seen the body. But this pales when police find Millicent's bracelet in the neighbor's bedroom and Alex learns she was having an affair, which becomes reason enough for each of them to be arrested sequentially on suspicion of murder. The Mercers have suffered grievously already, when they lost an unborn child, but this is tearing the family apart as never before. VERDICT McPherson's debut prolongs suspense until the dreadful truth becomes undeniable, raising the questions of how these well-drawn characters will survive and how justice is best served. With major marketing intended, expect demand.--Michele Leber, Arlington, VA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2015
In the wake of a neighbor's apparent suicide, a young London family comes under suspicion as they uncover secret after secret about each other and their relationships in McPherson's debut mystery. Alex, Millicent, and their 11-year-old son, Max, have been dealing with the aftermath of a family tragedy that has led, somewhat ironically, to Millicent's success as an author of self-help books. When Alex and Max then discover the body of their neighbor Bryce, it appears to be a suicide. But as Alex and the police begin to dig deeper, they find connections between Millicent and the neighbor that suggest the truth might be much darker. McPherson's mystery is carefully constructed, a literary house of cards. Layer upon layer of revelation increases the tension, but the characters behave so abominably that it becomes hard to stick with them to the end when the truth is revealed. In the era following the success of Gone Girl, there seems to be an overflow of psychological thrillers in which there is much mystery but no sympathetic character. This novel joins that category. The mystery of what happened to the neighbor is rather cleverly unspooled, but it becomes eclipsed by the outrageous and destructive antics of Alex and Millicent as well as the precocious Max. And once we know what happened to Bryce, the superficial response to this revelation is disturbing, neglecting to truly consider what it may mean for the future of the family. There are moments that almost seem like fantasy because they violate our expectations of how adults behave-but perhaps that's the attraction of this kind of thriller. Schadenfreude in spades, but a little too dark to be a comfortable guilty pleasure.

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