Book Review: The Necklace

Synopsis:

Susan Lentigo has been beaten down by life. Her only child, Amy, was brutally murdered twenty years ago. Shortly after that, her marriage to Amy’s father, Danny, her high school sweetheart, fell apart and he moved away. She has remained in Lake Luzerne, New York, the small town where they grew up, working as a waitress in the same diner and driving the same beat-up car.

Now the man who was convicted and sentenced to die is about to be executed, so the local townspeople throw a fundraiser to cover the costs of her travel to a federal penitentiary in North Dakota to witness the death sentence being carried out.

Her journey proves challenging. And shocking. She inadvertently discovers new evidence that causes her to question the condemned man’s guilt — and whether Amy’s real killer has thus far evaded justice. Her prime suspect has a young daughter nearly the age Amy was when she died, and Susan fears the girl could be in danger of meeting the same fate as Amy.

The FBI refuses to reopen the case. With no money and no time to spare, can Susan marshal enough evidence to convince the authorities that the wrong man is about to be put to death? The agents, along with her own mother, believe she’s just having an emotional breakdown as the execution date approaches.

Susan has to summon inner strength and resolve she never knew she possessed, and fight to see that her daughter’s real killer is the one who pays for the crime. She finds two unlikely allies — Kyra, a cynical, defiant teenage girl, and the now-retired FBI agent who investigated the case and arrested the man whose execution is imminent.

Susan may become an unlikely heroine, determined to uncover the truth before an innocent man is put to death and another little girl harmed. Can she finally ensure justice for the condemned man . . . and her murdered daughter?

Review:

Author Matt Witten was inspired to write The Necklace when he read a news article about a woman in a small town in upstate New York who was holding a fundraising event at a local bar. She needed to raise enough money to travel to witness the execution of the man who raped and murdered her daughter twenty-two years earlier. Witten says, “Everything about this story stuck with me: not only the tragic death, but also the woman’s dire circumstances and her quest to find justice and closure two decades later.” But the story didn’t come together in his mind. “I was thinking she’s on her way to get retribution and maybe she meets the brother of the man or someone related and she forms a relationship with this person and then she realizes maybe she doesn’t want the guy to be executed. . . but it wasn’t really coming together for me,” Witten says. It wasn’t until he was chatting with fellow writer John Henry Davis, who asked, “What if the guy who’s being executed maybe didn’t do it?” that the pieces of the tale clicked into place and he began writing a story not focused on a woman seeking retribution but, rather, seeking the truth.

Matt employs alternating third-person narratives to tell the gut-wrenching story. He says he found writing two different timelines challenging, but they fit together seamlessly into a cohesive whole. One narrative begins in 2001 with Susan Lentigo helping her seven-year-old daughter, Amy, make a necklace from plastic beads. The girl strings together a dolphin, duck, and blue unicorn, surrounded by multi-colored plain beads, and happily declares that she is never going to take the necklace off. “Not even when I die.” She is wearing the necklace the next morning when Susan drops her off in front of the elementary school and watches her skip off with her three best friends.

Danny, a realtor, has not sold a house in some time and money is tight. Susan works at the local diner owned by her friend Molly, and plans to cover both the lunch and dinner shifts. So she arrange for her mother, Lenora, to pick Amy up from school with one proviso: she asks Lenora to keep her latest boyfriend away from Amy, who has expressed feeling uncomfortable being around him and called “pretty baby.” After Susan’s father died, Lenora began seeing a variety of men and making bad choices, especially when drinking but she is a loving grandmother to Amy.

Susan is stunned when Danny calls her at the diner that evening and informs her that when he went to Lenora’s house to pick Amy up, neither of them were there. Instead, he discovered a message on the answering machine from Lenora, apologizing for having just remembered she had plans for the evening and would not be able to pick Amy up. Susan never heard the message because Lenora left it after Susan left the house. Four hours after school ended, Amy is missing. Lenora did not pick her up from school, her whereabouts are unknown, and Susan begins living every parent’s worst nightmare.

Amy’s body is found on the shore of the Mettawee River near Granville, an hour east of Lake Luzerne. There is a bloody gash on her forehead, and forensic evidence shows she was sexually assaulted and strangled. She was not wearing the necklace and it was never found. “The killer had taken the necklace, for a souvenir. He enjoyed killing Amy so much, he saved a keepsake.” Susan felt “a passionate desire to make that man suffer overwhelmed Susan’s heart and soul.”

Curt Jansen, a drifter, confesses to the crime, claiming that he was staying in a motel in town and parked across the highway from the school. He explains that he targeted Amy because he liked her necklace. And that causes Susan to feel guilty. “She kept thinking how the necklace she and Amy made together had caused all this.” Eventually, he recants but to no avail. The jury rejects his claim that he was subjected to hours of interrogation without being provided food or drink, and only wanted to sleep because he drank heavily prior to being arrested so he finally told FBI agent Robert Pappas what he wanted to hear. He is convicted of murder and, after Susan speaks during the sentencing phase of trial, demanding that he be sentenced to death, he is incarcerated in a federal prison in North Dakota.

In the aftermath, Susan falls apart and so does her marriage to Danny. She can’t imagine her life without Danny, but, of course, how can she envision it stretching on without Amy? Danny eventually moves away and they have not been in touch for many years. Susan isn’t sure if he even realizes the execution date is approaching, as she has not worked up the courage to actually speak to him when she dials his number. He has remarried and moved to Tamarack where he runs Tamarack Realty and lives in a beautiful home with his second wife, son, and young daughter, Emily.

He took her necklace for a souvenir. I’m hoping he’ll tell me where he put it. I’d like to put the necklace on Amy’s grave. ~~ Susan in The Necklace

Via the present day narrative, Witten details Susan’s fraught journey to North Dakota. She sets out in the old Dodge Dart she still drives twenty years after transporting Amy to school in it on that tragic day, her pockets stuffed with money donated during the fundraiser. Witten says he “wanted to show the obstacles that people face in daily life that people who have more money don’t think about.” And he succeeds spectacularly. Her trip starts out badly and gets worse. Literally, nothing goes right for her, and Susan soon realizes that if she is going to make it to North Dakota, she must be resourceful and resilient. Witten imbues her with a steely determination to rise above her circumstances that ultimately serves her well as she stumbles upon evidence that the FBI never discovered and struggles to understand how it fits together to reveal whether Curt Jansen actually killed Amy.

The mystery at the heart of the story is centered around Amy’s necklace, foreshadowed early in the book. Susan was unable to have more children and never remarried. Her mother has urged her to “move on,” but she has led a solitary, heartbroken life working at the diner, mourning her daughter, and awaiting the day “the Monster,” as she dubbed Jansen long ago, will pay the price for killing her cherished only child. “But somehow, even twenty years later, the story didn’t feel finished. She still had a feeling in her bones that she couldn’t put her finger on, that didn’t make sense, that there was something about her daughter’s murder she had missed, and if she had noticed it at the time, she could have prevented it. But what did she miss? What could she have done?”

Witten compassionately portrays Susan’s grief, anger, and confusion as she struggles to make sense of the evidence adduced twenty years ago . . . and what she discovers as Jansen’s execution date is imminent. The character is believable, undoubtedly at least in part because Witten says she is a composite of several women he has known in the economically challenged foothills of the Adirondacks. As she begins to doubt that the wrong man was convicted, she strives to dismiss her misgivings because they are so upsetting. As memories flood back to her and she re-evaluates all that she assumed to be true in the days following Amy’s murder, she becomes increasingly unable to put her suspicions aside. Soon she is on a quest for the truth, following clues and reassessing not only her life with Danny and Amy, but what the evidence might actually mean.

The Necklace is a compelling story of one mother’s determination to find justice for her slain child. Susan is an unforgettable and empathetic character. Witten credibly explores her emotional journeys, twenty years apart, believably illustrating her her re-examination of all she readily assumed leads her to the truth. And the truth is unspeakably horrible, but Susan bravely proceeds toward it, unable to continue ignoring the signs she missed so long ago. Witten found the most difficult part of penning the story “understanding Susan and why she was wrong about aspects of her life. Why she was fooled about some of her relationships,” Witten said.

Susan is aided by Robert Pappas, the FBI agent who was in charge of the investigation into Amy’s killing and proceeded in accordance with established law enforcement protocols. Now retired, he never stopped caring about the cases he worked on, as evidenced by his intent to travel to North Dakota and watch the man he arrested be put to death. He is principled and earnest, believably horrified at the prospect that he helped incarcerate an innocent man for twenty years who could now be executed for a crime he didn’t commit. The character is based on one of Witten’s friends, a former Los Angeles detective. En route to North Dakota, Susan also encounters a high school student, Kyra, with a troubled past. The two of them team up in reckless pursuit of evidence, kindred spirits who manage to find and recognize each other. And Curt Jensen, a man who is transformed by twenty years of incarceration, was inspired by one of the inmates Witten encountered while teaching playwriting at a correctional facility. Witten describes that inmate as “a dignified man in his thirties who had been in prison for murder for fifteen years and preferred to be called Mr. Smith instead of by his first name.”

Witten reveals that he alternated between writing draft versions of the novel and a screenplay based upon it, a process that helped him learn more about his characters. That technique, coupled with his extensive background as a playwright and writer for episodic television series, serves him well. The story’s pace is relentless, the dialogue credible, and the scenes unfold vividly, making the tale both engrossing and emotionally resonant. As Susan inches closer to the truth, courageously confronting her suspicions, readers will join her in hoping that her hunches prove inaccurate. The story culminates with heart-stopping scenes inside the penitentiary as plans for the execution move forward. Witten can be forgiven for taking some technical liberties for the sake of dramatic impact (visitors admitted to correctional facilities to witness executions are not escorted through condemned housing units en route to the execution chamber, for instance).

The Necklace is an absorbing and powerful story with a clever twist that provides the answers Susan, his heroic protagonist, has needed for so many years in order to find peace and grieve the loss of her child without doubts creeping in and causing her additional strife.

Ironically, after he wrote the novel, Witten learned about Carol Dodge, an Idaho woman who devoted herself to proving the innocence of the man who was convicted of raping and killing her daughter. She was “relentless,” according to Witten, and her efforts resulted in the conviction being overturned and the real murderer apprehended.

In the case of The Necklace, did fiction imitate real life? Readers will undoubtedly enjoy finding out.