The Night Following

Distracted by the daffodil-flocked Wiltshire countryside speeding past her, or perhaps by the condom wrapper she has found in her husband's car, the unnamed doctor's wife plows into the doomed bicyclist—shattering several lives and launching a haunting journey that should burnish the reputation of Joss (Half Broken Things , which won the CWA's Silver Dagger Award) as one of Britain's most original crafters of psychological suspense. The guilt-ridden hit-and-run driver becomes increasingly obsessed with the victim, recently retired English teacher Ruth Mitchell, and Ruth's devastated widower, Arthur. Providing emotional contrast are the notes Arthur leaves for Ruth and excerpts from The Cold and the Beauty and the Dark , the slow-paced multigenerational saga Ruth was bringing to her writing group on the fateful day. As the narrator finds herself irresistibly drawn to the Mitchells' home, a nightly witness to Arthur's decline, boundaries begin to blur. Increasingly, her flashbacks to her own family history begin eerily to mirror the clan in Ruth's manuscript. But, Joss asks provocatively, who are any of us apart from the stories we choose to believe—those we create and those we appropriate? (Mar.)