Stevie‘s review of Day of the Accident by Nuala Ellwood
Women’s Suspense Fiction published by Penguin 25 Jan 19
I have a slightly uneasy relationship with suspense fiction, more so with romantic suspense, but also with the regular variety. The blurb for this book intrigued me enough, however, that I requested a copy via Net Galley without anything in the way of further investigation. And to begin with, it appeared that I’d been correct in my assumption that this was a mystery in which the protagonist attempts to piece together the gaps in their memory and find out what really happened to them and to the other accident victims.
Maggie wakes from a coma with no recollection of the time leading up to the accident that left her unconscious and her young daughter drowned in a river. Nothing the police or hospital staff can tell her makes any sense. Her daughter was locked in Maggie’s car when it rolled down the slope into the water, and Maggie sustained her injuries while attempting a rescue. Maggie’s daughter was terrified of being left in the car and would have hysterics if the locks were set, so why would Maggie have subjected her to that fear – and how did the car come to roll down the slope when overprotective Maggie was so conscientious about checking the handbrake? Not only that, Maggie cannot imagine what took her to that spot in the first place. The only possible destination nearby is a pub she had visited once and disliked enough not to plan a return visit.
The next shocks for Maggie come when she finds out that her husband walked out of the hospital following their daughter’s funeral and gave up the lease on the house Maggie thought they owned together. With nowhere to go back to on her release from hospital, and with no friends to fall back on due to her extreme closeness – as she thought – to her husband and daughter, Maggie is forced to rely on Social Services to set her up with temporary accommodation – and with a carer to visit and ensure she takes the correct medication for her remaining injuries.
As Maggie tries to remember more of what happened in the days leading up to the accident, and hunts for clues as to where her husband went and what he did with her possessions, she begins to wonder how many of these recent events are tied to mistakes she made as a teenager. In attempting to make contact with the remaining people from that time – her ex-boyfriend’s parents – and to jog her memory by revisiting the house where she lived both as a child and as a married woman and mother, Maggie is befriended by the current tenant at the house, a young doctor who shows great interest in Maggie’s memory issues and with the issues from her past that have prevented her from forming many stable relationships as an adult.
So far, so good, but then it all started to go wrong as Maggie inexplicably found herself beset by enemies and began to receive letters which she believed were from her supposedly dead daughter. The letters are interspersed with the main narrative throughout the story and are a bleak tale of child deprivation that don’t really fit the timeline of either Maggie’s daughter’s possible post-accident story or with any part of Maggie’s childhood when the events of that are finally revealed to readers. The identity of the true villains of the piece came as a shock, but it also felt to me that they had been turned into caricatures of individuals with their supposed back stories. The final showdown between Maggie and those she had supposedly harmed in the past, and who now wanted to get their revenge, didn’t feel at all real to me.
All in all, a story of bleak events happening to not particularly nice people. Not my cup of tea at all.
Grade: D
Summary:
They say you killed…BUT WHAT IF THEY’RE WRONG?
Sixty seconds after she wakes from a coma, Maggie’s world is torn apart
The police tell her that her daughter Elspeth is dead. That she drowned when the car Maggie had been driving plunged into the river. Maggie remembers nothing.
When Maggie begs to see her husband Sean, the police tell her that he has disappeared. He was last seen on the day of her daughter’s funeral.
What really happened that day at the river?
Where is Maggie’s husband?
And why can’t she shake the suspicion that somewhere, somehow, her daughter is still alive?
No excerpt available.
