5/26/2023 0 Comments The guest list review![]() ![]() Irish writer Rachel Donohue’s debut, The Temple House Vanishing (Corvus, £12.99), begins a quarter of a century after the disappearances of 16-year-old schoolgirl Louisa and charismatic young art teacher Mr Lavelle, with Louisa’s erstwhile best friend Victoria leaping to her death from the top of an office block. Jones is strikingly good on emotional legacies, how – as Larkin didn’t quite put it – woman hands on misery to woman. Although the big reveal isn’t wholly convincing, there’s plenty of tension. ![]() It should be plain sailing, but both women have secrets. Leslie, for reasons known only to herself, is desperate for the cash, and Mary wants to start over, so if the pair can pull off the con it’s win-win, and Mary accompanies Leslie back to Albuquerque to meet her husband and infant son. On meeting waitress and aspiring actor Mary, who bears enough resemblance to Robin for superficial changes to make her a plausible substitute, she offers a deal: her sister’s share of the loot in exchange for a successful impersonation. When Leslie tracks her prodigal sister down to a scruffy rented room in Las Vegas and discovers a corpse with a fake ID, she flees. ![]() If she doesn’t, she won’t get her inheritance: their father’s will stipulates that the women must appear together at the lawyer’s office in order for the money to be released. In American author Tanen Jones’s first novel, The Better Liar (Harvill Secker, £12.99), Leslie Flores needs to find her sister Robin, who absconded from the family home a decade earlier as a teenager. ![]()
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