Book Review: Six Weeks to Live

Synopsis:

Jennifer Barnes wasn’t prepared for the shocking news her doctor delivered during a routine appointment: she has a terminal brain tumor. And only six weeks to live.

Stunned by the diagnosis, the forty-eight-year-old decides to spend the little time she has left with her family — her adult triplet daughters and twin grandsons — close by her side.

But when she realizes she may have been poisoned a year earlier, she’s determined to discover who might have tried to get rid of her. Before she’s gone for good. Separated from her attorney husband, Jake, who has been pressuring her for a divorce, Jennifer focuses her suspicions on him.

Her daughters each process the news differently. Emily, the calm, organized medical student and mother of three-year-old twin boys, provides support and whatever assistance Jennifer needs. Aline, the moody scientist who has kept her mother at arm’s length since she was quite young, nonetheless agrees to help with Jennifer’s investigation. Even imprudent, unmoored Miranda, who recently moved back home, is unusually solicitous.

But her daughters doubt Jennifer’s allegations against their father, causing Jennifer to consider a more benign explanation for the elevated level of lead in her blood.

Is it all in her head? Or did someone want her dead?

Review:

Bestselling author Catherine McKenzie is a native of Montreal, Canada, and graduate of McGill University where she studied history and law. She continued practicing law while writing ten bestselling novels in the early mornings and on weekends, including Spin, Arranged, Forgotten, Hidden, Smoke, Fractured, The Good Liar, I’ll Never Tell, and You Can’t Catch Me. She retired from her law practice in April 2020 to focus exclusively on writing. In her eleventh novel, Six Weeks to Live, she seamlessly welds suspense and family drama into a fast-paced tale of secrets, betrayals, grudges, and revenge.

Jennifer has had a rough couple of years. It turned out that her husband, Jake, a successful attorney, wasn’t really working late. And when he seemed glued to his phone, he wasn’t responding to clients. He was actually having an affair with the daughter of the senior partner at his law firm, sneaking out of the office for trysts with her in her law school dorm room. When he confessed what he had been doing and announced that he was moving out of the family home, Jennifer thought, as she relates in her first-person narrative, “one of us was having an aneurism. But it was happening, it wasn’t a product of my imagination or some sort of psychosis.” Jake claimed he loved Kim “more than anything,” rewriting the history of his relationship with Jennifer. In his version of events, he married Jennifer when she was a medical student after she became pregnant because “it was the honorable thing to do. He stayed with me because he loved the girls and couldn’t imagine not being there for every moment of their growing up.” But with the triplets grown, he wanted to get on with his life and being “great friends” with Jennifer would be enough. He built a new house into which he moved with Kim, started working out, had his teeth whitened, and took his rightful place in “the club of cliched men everywhere.”

With Jake’s departure, Jennifer’s world tilted on its axis, but she got through the lonely, tearful nights with the love and support of her best friend, Suzie, as well as her long-time therapist, Paul. And a lot of wine. Eventually, she began a relationship with Andrew, an eccentric artist who couldn’t be more different from Jake.

But as the book opens, Jennifer finds herself facing the greatest — and final — challenge of her life when her doctor informs her that her unrelenting headaches have been caused by an inoperable glioblastoma, a grade 4 cancer, and she has only six to eight weeks to live. The physician warns her that because the tumor is in her temporal lobe, which regulates speech, memory, behavior, vision, hearing, and emotions, she can expect to experience increasing headaches and cognitive difficulties. After leaving the doctor’s office, she reviews the paperwork she was given, including the results of a full blood panel performed a year ago. Because Jennifer was in her third year of medical school when she became pregnant with the triplets, she takes comfort in the fact that medical terminology remains “locked into my long-term memory.” Reviewing the lab results, she realizes that the previous blood test showed not only an usually high level of lead in her system, but enough lead to have devastating consequences. Like a terminal brain tumor.

Do you ever think that you live your whole life thinking one thing and then something else ends up being true?

Jennifer becomes fixated on Jake, with whom her relationship has been contentious because she has refused to agree to a quiet, amicable divorce that wouldn’t embarrass him before his legal colleagues and the judges before whom he practices family law. She convinces herself that Jake, who still has access to the family home in which she resides, poisoned her in order to get her out of the way so he can marry Kim. For Jennifer, refusing the divorce was “taking my power back in the only way I could.” Each of her three daughters — Emily, the fraternal twin, and identical twins Miranda and Aline — has her own uniquely fractious relationship with Jake, but none of them believe him capable of murder. To placate Jennifer, however, Aline agrees to test a sample of water taken from the residence in the lab where she is employed.

The girls react differently to Jennifer’s diagnosis. Every family has alliances. And Emily has always been aligned with Jennifer, probably because they are so much alike. A medical student herself, Emily is raising twin boys with her husband, Chris, and struggling to remain supportive and resilient while managing her stressors, mindful of her own history of postpartum depression. Aline has been angry with Jennifer for many years, and questions why she should resolve her conflicts with her mother just because she’s dying. She’s never fully understood why she and her mother have been at odds. But if nothing else, she does want to help Jennifer find peace about her circumstances before she dies. Miranda returned home after a short, disastrous stint with the Peace Corps in Namibia on a flight paid for by Jake. She convinced Jennifer to let her move back into the family home, but does not have an established career, instead spending her days hitting balls at the tennis club and having romantic dalliances. Her father has told her that he is cutting off her club membership at the end of the summer.

In light of Jennifer’s obsession with learning who may have tried to kill her, the girls compare their memories about growing up, finding that their recollections differ dramatically. But one thing is clear: they were sent to spend six months with Jennifer’s mother, Bea, while Jennifer underwent treatment for cancer. And when Jennifer returned home, she was not the same. As they evaluate the facts, shocking revelations come to light, including a disturbing pact one of the girls made with Jake. When they confront their mother with their theory, Jennifer admits that significant truths were deliberately withheld from the girls, in part because Jennifer believed that if damaging information came to light, it would threaten the family. The three daughters’ relationships with each other are tested as they come to grips with their actual family history and Jennifer’s quickly deteriorating condition.

Once again, McKenzie has crafted a cleverly-plotted, compelling story populated with fascinating characters, each of whom is fully imagined and compassionately depicted. Some are plainly unlikable because of their flaws. Jennifer loves her daughters dearly, despite her issues and challenges. Highly intelligent, she recognized her shortcomings and did her best to overcome them. She worked hard to put her life and family back together after that six-month period away from her girls, and thought she had succeeded . . . until Jake left. She could never have envisioned, of course, the far-reaching impact her problems and the secrets she harbored would have on her daughters so many years later. As McKenzie reveals clues to what really happened, she also explores her characters’ emotional reactions in a credible. Particularly touching is the friendship Jennifer shares with Suzie, her unwaveringly loyal supporter and confidante, who promises to take action after Jennifer’s death, if necessary.

Six Weeks to Live is a twisty, twisted tale of deception and duplicity — an absorbing, entertaining and, ultimately, heartbreaking exploration of a family in crisis. Readers will find themselves frantically turning the pages to see how the mystery resolves, only to be met with a gut-punch ending with which McKenzie shockingly illustrates the myriad ways in which our past influences our future.