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Fiction. Mystery. Thriller. HTML: When Isabel Burley returns home to care for her mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's, she finds a bemused, angry old woman, prey to the dangers of failing memory, the inability to run her household--and the local villains who are eyeing her isolated home. But as the locals close in, Isabel finds herself struggling with her own emotions. She thinks she has come home to do some good, but is she really looking for the affection she lacked as a child? Alienated by her mother's growing eccentricity, Isabel becomes locked in a relationship of love, conflict, and simmering violence, with roots that go deep into the past..
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LibraryThing member John
This is a departure for Fyfield: an "ordinary" novel as opposed to her better-know crime novels. There is a crime in this one too, but it is not central to the story of Isabel Burley who returns to her childhood home, out of a sense of obligation and guilt more than love, to take care of her
All in all not a great, but a satisfy exploration of a difficult mother-daughter relationship freighted with so much baggage, some of it real, some of it imagined, some of it mistaken. Isabel works her way through a series of emotions: first a certain self-righteousness for her sacrifice and support to a woman she is convinced she does not love but actively hates for having been too beautiful and too vivacious and too competitive and not enough of a mother; through frustration and anger when she becomes abusive and strikes her mother; through the trauma of a burglary when Isabel is physically molested but which she says nothing about, perhaps because of a mistaken guilt about her promiscuous youth and life; to a deeper understanding of and sympathy for the fear Serena has in seeing her sanity slip away; to a better anchoring of her own life.
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mother, Serena, who is increasingly incapacitated by Alzheimer's disease. The characters are little stock: the guilty and embittered daughter who remembers the past selectively and idolizes the wrong people, the feckless son focused more on what he will receive from the estate, the former beauty and bon vivant increasingly disabled by the disease and slowly losing her grip on reality, the former lover, of Isabel, who offers a certain stability, insight and new relationship, a trio of bungling burglars, and George, the taciturn man with a shadowy past who exhibits the purest, most selfless love for Serena. All in all not a great, but a satisfy exploration of a difficult mother-daughter relationship freighted with so much baggage, some of it real, some of it imagined, some of it mistaken. Isabel works her way through a series of emotions: first a certain self-righteousness for her sacrifice and support to a woman she is convinced she does not love but actively hates for having been too beautiful and too vivacious and too competitive and not enough of a mother; through frustration and anger when she becomes abusive and strikes her mother; through the trauma of a burglary when Isabel is physically molested but which she says nothing about, perhaps because of a mistaken guilt about her promiscuous youth and life; to a deeper understanding of and sympathy for the fear Serena has in seeing her sanity slip away; to a better anchoring of her own life.
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