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A review by ruthiella
A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine
4.0
I put this book on my TBR years ago because I read somewhere (in a blog or goodreads maybe) that this was a better, more realistic version of Tana French’s The Likeness. My assumption was that this was also a mystery with a doppelgangers (a la Brat Ferrar), but it’s not that.
The book opens with the remains of a human skeleton being found buried on the grounds of a country home in Suffolk. Naturally the police investigate. The story then slowly unfolds in flashbacks and forwards between 1986 London and 1976 Suffolk.
Fatal Inversion is an intense psychological suspense story. There is a murder but the focus is less on who did it and why (although that is eventually revealed) and more on how this murder has poisoned the lives of those who were witness to the crime and its cover-up. I can see the Tana French comparison a bit, you have young adults (18-25) living in a house which is sheltered and suspended from the outside world and a lot of emotional manipulation going on in that close environment. But personally if I had to compare this book to any other that I have read, it would be Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger because of the ever building sense of dread and the way the survivors are figuratively haunted in the aftermath.
The book opens with the remains of a human skeleton being found buried on the grounds of a country home in Suffolk. Naturally the police investigate. The story then slowly unfolds in flashbacks and forwards between 1986 London and 1976 Suffolk.
Fatal Inversion is an intense psychological suspense story. There is a murder but the focus is less on who did it and why (although that is eventually revealed) and more on how this murder has poisoned the lives of those who were witness to the crime and its cover-up. I can see the Tana French comparison a bit, you have young adults (18-25) living in a house which is sheltered and suspended from the outside world and a lot of emotional manipulation going on in that close environment. But personally if I had to compare this book to any other that I have read, it would be Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger because of the ever building sense of dread and the way the survivors are figuratively haunted in the aftermath.