'Something Might Happen'
By: Julie Myerson
(Hardcover / 336 Pages / Little Brown & Company / ISBN: 0316779849 / $23.95)
Description: 'Something Might Happen' is powerful literary suspense in the bestselling tradition of Helen Dunmore and Jane Hamilton. Out of the grief and confusion that follow the death of her closest friend, Tess seizes on a single individual. It is a detective - come to town to investigate the death - whose calm and clarity offer her hope. In coming to know him, Tess gradually unravels the extraordinary skein of secrets, evasions, and repressed passion that her life has become.
Verdict: Isn't it always in the midst of everyday routine that fate steps in and changes everything? The obscure glitch suddenly becomes more sinister: someone is late or doesn't show up at the usual time. There is no explanation, but within hours, there is a phone call that changes a family forever, the façade of safety abruptly shattered.
At the best of times, we like to think we live as if every moment matters, but the truth is that we forget, caught up in the mundane tasks that fill the hours of the day. For two English couples living near the ocean with their children, their days are predictable, with young children to Shepard from one place to another, play dates and sports events. Brutality strikes a blow to this comfortable domesticity for one couple, when Lennie, wife of Alex, fails to return home one late evening after a meeting. When Alex phones Tess and Mick, their best friends, they begin the long descent into acceptance of the truth: that Lennie has been murdered, a senseless murder with no apparent suspect or motive. In addition, the body has been mutilated in a particularly gruesome manner.
Myerson's style is remarkably uncluttered and the novel is structured in such as way that allows the reader to perch, like the proverbial fly on the wall, watching the story unfold. The character's forceful personalities create the texture of their relationships, for example, between Tess and her husband, Mick, Tess and her daughter, Rose. With minimal, never superfluous description, Myerson's characters define each scene with their actions. The reader is privy to the same sense of immediacy experienced by the protagonists, as vulnerable to the vagaries of fate as anyone in the story. By 'Something Might Happen' today as hope that something DOES happen ... that your mind expands and absorbs this wonderful novel.
Reviewed by Valerie Warhurst
www.twbookmark.com