AFTER ANNA by Lisa Scottoline
Lisa Scottoline’s new novel AFTER ANNA is one of those books you pick up and can’t put down. It should come with a label reading “Danger: Curves and swerves ahead” because Scottoline uses her writing talent to lead readers down a long and winding road. It is full of surprises and that is a good thing. That you don’t really buy into all of the surprises is not.
Maggie Alderman is happily married to Noah. He had been married previously but had lost his wife to cancer. Left to raise their son Caleb, he had been coping with his work as a doctor and his responsibilities as a parent, and doing a good job. When he met Maggie it was if she just fit right into his and Caleb’s world and made it complete again.
Maggie was very happy. The only thing darkening her world was she had never gotten over the fact she had a daughter Anna who had been raised by her ex-husband. After Anna’s birth Maggie had slipped into postpartum depression which was eventually changed to a diagnosis of postpartum psychosis. Maggie had known at that time she could not be a good mother to her child and her husband took advantage of this to take Anna away from her and keep her from her for the next seventeen years. It was a hole in Maggie’s heart that had never healed.
Amazingly when Anna was seventeen years old she contacted Maggie. She was in a private school and her father had died. Now she wanted to come to live with Maggie and her family. Maggie was overjoyed and Noah accepted the news graciously. In a short amount of time Anna moved in with her mother, stepfather and stepbrother.
The book proceeds in two ways. One structure of chapters concerns Noah being on trial for murdering Anna. The other tells the story of Anna coming to live with the Alderman family and the days leading up to her murder. One set of chapters is designated “Noah After” and the alternate chapters are marked as “Maggie: Before”.
Telling the story in this way is a bit confusing as the time sequences do not all move ahead but in some instances go back to a place before the last chapters occurred. Still most readers will fall into the flow of things and manage to keep up with the events as they occur in both sections.
The problem is the way the events play out. Scottoline injects one shock after another and keeps the reader stunned with different unexpected elements. They make for enjoyable reading but as you look back over what you have read, you don’t believe it completely. It is just a fraction or more over the top of what you can accept. Still it is better to be entertained by a story that leaves you gasping for breath than to be bored to tears by one which is too predictable. AFTER ANNA is anything but predictable.
My enjoyment was also hampered by my partial dislike of Maggie. There was just something off-putting about her personality. Maybe others will not feel this way but I did. And if you don’t particularly care for Maggie then you won’t buy the payoff of the story.
Scottoline certainly knows how to keep you glued to the pages she writes. AFTER ANNA is a suspenseful book with a capital “S”. As I said at the start of this review you will not be able to put it down. I just wish I could have bought into the twists of the story, and most of all really liked Maggie.
AFTER ANNA is published by St Martin’s Press. It contains 352 pages and sells for $27.99.
Jackie K Cooper
www.jackiekcooper.com
