cover image A Bluethroat Morning

A Bluethroat Morning

Jacqui Lofthouse. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, $24.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-1-58234-086-9

Lofthouse's second novel, after The Temple of Hymen, is an intelligently crafted but uninspired psychological suspense story, a whydunit about the suicide of a woman who seemed to have little reason to kill herself. Six years after the death of his young wife, one-time supermodel Alison Oakley, 58-year-old Harry Bliss walks out on his London teaching job barely a week before he is due to retire. He is determined to visit Glaven, the small English town where Alison lived before she walked into the ocean one ""bluethroat morning,"" and discover what exactly led up to her death. After a descent into anorexia at the end of her modeling career, Alison recovered by writing a bestselling, prize-winning novel about the modeling industry. Around the same time, she met and married Harry, who gave her the time and privacy to write. Though bestsellerdom proved nearly as stressful as supermodeldom, Alison had retreated to Glaven and was working apace on her next novel, when she apparently destroyed her manuscript and took her life. Why? Harry is not alone in his quest. He is accompanied by Helen Cregar, the 19-year-old daughter of his best friend and the only woman who has interested him since his wife's death, and followed by hangers-on, journalists and even another academic. The clues Harry needs most are given up slowly by nonagenarian Ern Higham, who teaches Harry about white-throated and blue-throated birds and keeps safe one of Alison's last possessions. Lofthouse convincingly captures Harry's fusty and sorrowful presence, and the passages from Alison's perspective are engaging and penetrating. But no matter how skillfully Lofthouse manages the revelations of her multiple parallel stories, her voice is muted and the narrative lacks resonance. (July)