Deception: A Novel (ISBN 0316735922)

Secrets behind closed doors ..:
'Deception' (marketed as 'Sanctum' in the UK) is an engrossing mystery. Lachlan Harriot is seeking evidence of his wife Susie's innocence following her conviction for the murder or a paroled serial killer who had been under her psychiatric care. In Susie's home office, which Lachlan has previously been forbidden to enter, he discovers a disturbing documentary history: transcripts of conversations, photographs, letters and files. What is the truth? And who, utimately, survives? While this is Denise Mina's fourth novel,it is only the second I have read. I am keen to read the rest. Jennifer Cameron-Smith

"I wonder how I could live with her and know her so little":
Lachlan and Susie Harriott seem to have it all. She's a prison psychiatrist with lots of family money; he trained as a doctor but stays at home in their secluded Glasgow house to write and tend baby Margie. Their peaceful existence falls apart when Susie becomes obsessed with the case of a prisoner convicted of brutal serial murders. After the man is released from prison on appeal, he and his new prison bride are murdered and Susie is tried for the crime. Lachlan pursues the hidden truth, hoping to find grounds for appeal of Susie's conviction. Those are the main facts of the story; how would YOU write them? Author Denise Mina chose Lachlan's diary as the narrative vehicle, an interesting choice because unlike the usual first-person narrator of a suspense tale -- "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" -- our Lachlan has not written his story for the public but rather as a private journal of his discoveries and his emotional response to them. The device by which his diary is revealed adds to the impression of private musings laid open for the greedy public eye. Not only is his point of view imperfect due to his participation in the story, it also reveals a less-than-engaging protagonist. The reader joins company with the spectators packing in scones to devour with vending-machine tea during breaks in the trial -- voyeurs of a private calamity. Deception: A Novel is an absorbing read for any fan of the psychological thriller. We see Lachlan decompensating as he finds evidence that Susie has fundamentally rejected their relationship. Once the stage is set with Susie's guilty verdict we fall deeper and deeper into his loss of control. Mina gives us a diary with bitter and spare word pictures; Lachlan, writing of his parents who fail so terribly to understand anything at all, says, "The card they sent for (his daughter's) first birthday had a Monet print on it and a tenner inside. They might as well have sent her duty-free cigarettes." If there is a flaw in this book, it is that once we've accepted Lachlan's state of mind as the focus, there is a flurry of things actually HAPPENING near the end; it's almost a distraction to become embroiled in the plot action at that late stage. With that reservation -- and it's a slight one -- I recommend this book for its wonderful prose and complex characterizations. Four stars. This is my first book by Denise Mina and I'll be reading the rest for the sheer enjoyment of her writing style. Linda Bulger, 2008

How well do you know your spouse?:
Deception is deceptively good. Not great, but good. If you were to offer me a novel framed as a diary of a vain, whiny, pathetic and ineffective protagonist, I'd say forget it! But I took a chance with Denise Mina whose highly-praised novels I'd not read before, and I'm glad I did. When psychiatrist Dr. Susan Harriot is convicted of murdering her patient, Andrew Gow, husband Lachlan frantically searches for proof of her innocence amongst her papers and computer files in her home office. Gow was a self-confessed serial rapist-killer whose modus operandi was eerily duplicated on two other victims while he was in prison. This and Gow's insistence on his innocence and that the confession was made under duress result in his release. Shortly after, he is found murdered and his new wife, Donna, has vanished, presumed dead as well. Prosecution contended that Susie had been having an affair with Gow, and in a fit of rage over being passed over for Donna, had killed him. Lachlan doesn't believe any of it. He knows his Susie. Or does he? Deception is a story not just of murder, but of a marriage in peril and what we choose (or not) to divulge to those we're most intimate with. As he realizes how little he knows his wife, Lachlan writes: "It seems all we learned to do during our marriage is not talk." Susie kept her secrets well, so well that if Lachlan doesn't discover them his wife will languish in prison for life. I will admit the diary format with the inclusion of transcripts, clippings, reports, etc. can be rather tiresome. After about 200 pages of it, my mind was wandering. Lachlan writes about everything--the incremental discoveries he makes (which are critical to the story) and the minutiae of his everyday life since Susie was convicted. I suppose the steady stream of consciousness ramblings lost its novelty for me after 30 chapters. The last few chapters were, however, the meat of the story and I devoured them in short order. The ending was fantastic and the resolution satisfying. There are some humorous bits as well which I thought were caustically hilarious. Altogether, a satistactory read.

What is it with the Glasgow police?:
Like all of Mina's books "Deception" is a more-than-ordinarily well-written puzzler, which is generally all I require from a mystery. But this one had a logical inconsistency that bugged me the whole way through. Susie Harriot has been convicted of an enormously high-profile murder, yet all her papers, books and records appear to have been left untouched--her computer files unsearched--by the police. The material her husband Lachlan sorts through in her private office would most certainly have been confiscated and much of it brought up at trial. In all her books Mina demonstrates considerable mistrust of the police, who tend to be lazy, incompetent, bullies, or "bent." But surely the Glasgow prosecuctor's office wouldn't have ignored a treasure trove of evidence like this. It's possible Mina explains this somewhere in the book--if so I missed it. If not, in my mind the whole story falls apart.

In Need of a Good Editor:
I recently listened to an unabridged audiofile of this book with an excellent reader. While I listened from start to finish, the book was, in the end, very disappointing for the following reasons: 1. Mina frames the book with a story about how she came into possession of the computer files that make up the bulk of the book. While this might seem innovative and interesting in that it calls the veracity of the entire narrative into question, it's not a new device, and is actually quite conventional. (Just check out Robinson Crusoe, for example, among many. The best example of this sort of framing device, for my money, is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.) 2. The close first person narration is claustrophobic. Not only is the narrator writing the journal that becomes the narration in a small room, the narration itself is so filtered through his consciousness that it becomes wearing. Poe first explored the device of the unreliable narrator, but he was writing short stories, not a novel. It's very difficult to sustain interest in such a narrow point of view for very long, particularly when everything in the novel is told by the narrator after the events. 3. The pacing of the book is SLOW. A good editor could have helped sharpen the focus. 4. A good editor should have cut about 1/3 of the book to eliminate the repetitions. How many times must we listen to Lachlan shift from castigating his wife to wanting her back in his life? 5. The ending is unsatisfying. I love inconclusive endings, and books that play with notions of truth and storytelling (Take a look at Tim O'Brien's The Things We Carry, for example.) The ending of this book, however, feels more like Mina wrote herself into a corner, and decided just to end it however. 5. Finally, the narrator is a weak, vain, self-absorbed, and self-deceiving character. I don't need to love a main character to enjoy a novel--far from it. But the combination of the claustrophobic point of view combined with the utter unattractiveness of the narrator makes the book a very long slog. I gave the book two stars because there is some humor here. And, it might be that the experience of listening to the book caused me more impatience than I would have had reading it, since I could have skipped the tiresome repetitions. All in all, not really worth the time.