Murder Grove

November 7, 2022
In the prologue of this gripping if flawed psychological thriller from the pseudonymous Adamson (Five Strangers), a fresh body, an apparent murder victim, turns up in an olive grove outside Val Verde, Spain, the new home of the novel’s two unreliable narrators, Mia Banner and Rich Ellis. Six months earlier, Mia and Rich, romantic partners since their university days, decided to pack in their jobs in London and move into the house that Rich’s eccentric actor mother left to him in Val Verde. The corpse’s discovery sends Mia and Rich’s lives spiraling in unexpected directions. Their dueling narratives tease at problems within the relationship and disturbing experiences in both their pasts, leading each of them to question just how many lies they’re telling themselves as well as how many lies they’re telling each other. The corpse is identified only late in the book, and most of the action and the murder’s resolution unfold toward its end, by which time some readers, tired of all the psychobabble, will no longer care about the fates of these two emotionally damaged people. Hopefully, Adamson will do better next time. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aiken Alexander Assoc.

January 1, 2023
Rich thinks his wife, Mia, is "in one of her moods again." It could be because, as a young girl, Mia witnessed her mother's murder and was buried alive with her in a shallow grave. Or perhaps it is because Rich is cheating on her and, it turns out, has mother issues of a different sort. Having left their London home for a small Spanish village in the hope of building new lives, they are finding more of the same dissatisfaction with life in general and continue to be threatened by the same issues with each other's obsessions, although the weather is nicer in Spain. When a body is unearthed in the olive grove outside of town, they have reason to suspect each other, and, in fact, neither is sure the other did not commit the crime. Told alternately between the two badly damaged characters' points of view, this second psychological thriller from Adamson (after Five Strangers, 2021) is rife with distrust and disillusionment, with an ending that will surprise even astute readers and chill them to the bone.

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Starred review from December 1, 2022
How many ways can a romantic triangle turn murderous? Let Adamson count, and multiply, the ways. Mia Banner has left her teaching job in London to follow her longtime boyfriend, Richard Ellis, to the Andalusian village of Val Verde to live in La Casa de la Luz, the house his worthless mother left him in her will. She anticipates some difficulties settling into a neighborhood whose principal attraction is the volunteer organization Desert Shoots, but there's no way she could have known that Anna Fleming, the photojournalist she meets at an informal gathering, has already had a brief, lusty fling with Rich and plans to continue it under Mia's unsuspecting eyes. Assigning alternate chapters to Mia and Rich, Adamson details Rich's empty relationship with Marianne Ellis, the mother who neglected him to embrace the bottle until she drank herself to death, and hints ever more broadly at the traumatic crime in Mia's childhood from whose shadow she's struggled to emerge ever since. Rich assures Anna that he's going to leave Mia for her; when Mia discovers the affair, he assures her that he's going to send Anna away. Since each of the three leads has ample reason to kill each of the other two, the moment when Adamson finally reveals the identity of the corpse discovered in the opening chapter bids fair to diminish the rising tension. Miraculously, however, the author keeps coming up with new ways to ratchet up the suspense even further until the last line of the last chapter. A claustrophobic, breathlessly effective tale that seems to pave the way for a choose-your-own-murder series.

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