A Double Life
A Novel
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3.7 • 13 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“A thrilling page-turner.” —Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train
“Breathtaking . . . As shocking as it is satisfying.” —The New York Times Book Review
A riveting and sophisticated page-turner inspired by one of the most shocking true crimes in 20th century Britain: the Lord Lucan case.
“A better person would forgive him. A different sort of better person would have found him years ago.”
Claire is a hardworking doctor leading a simple, quiet life in London. She is also the daughter of the most notorious murder suspect in the country, though no one knows it.
Nearly thirty years ago, while Claire and her brother slept upstairs, a brutal crime was committed in her family's townhouse. The next morning, her father's car was found abandoned near the English Channel, with bloodstains on the front seat. Her mother insisted she'd seen him in the house that night, but his powerful, privileged friends maintained his innocence. The first lord accused of murder in more than a century, he has been missing ever since.
When the police tell Claire they've found him, her carefully calibrated existence begins to fracture. She doesn't know if she's the daughter of a murderer or a wronged man, but Claire will soon learn how far she'll go to finally find the truth.
Loosely inspired by one of the most notorious unsolved crimes of the 20th century – the Lord Lucan case – A Double Life is at once a riveting page-turner and a moving reflection on women and violence, trauma and memory, and class and privilege.
Named a Must-Read by Entertainment Weekly, Bustle, O Magazine, BBC, CrimeReads, and PureWow
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Come for the gripping, well-paced thriller; stay for the smart exploration of family dynamics. A Double Life offers both in spades. Flynn Berry’s sophomore novel (loosely based on an unsolved true-crime mystery) focuses on Claire, a thirtysomething woman who’s spent her life searching for her father, a vanished aristocrat wanted for a brutal crime. As confusing details jump out of the woodwork, Claire’s psychological state worsens. Her compulsive sleuthing builds to a stunning conclusion, but it’s the complicated relationship between Claire and her opioid-addict brother that gives the novel its emotional depth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
London doctor Claire Alden, the 34-year-old narrator of this engrossing psychological thriller from Edgar-winner Berry (Under the Harrow), remains obsessed with finding answers decades after the horrific night when her nanny was slaughtered in her family's Belgravia townhouse and her mother, Faye, was left near death. The crime's prime suspect, Claire's titled father, Colin Spenser, vanished without a trace. Claire, who leads an almost hermitlike existence, can't stop her sleuthing. She tails some of her father's posh friends in a desperate hunt for clues to his whereabouts as well as why they hated her working-class mother so much that they would shield a murderer. Claire combs through her own memories and Faye's extensive diary entries and other research to vividly imagine her parents' relationship, then subsequently manages to befriend, unrecognized, the daughter of one of Colin's closest chums in the hope of discovering further leads. The action builds to a shocking but satisfying conclusion. Berry tells this shattering story with surprising grace.
