Synopsis:
The Heights is a tall, slender apartment building among warehouses in London. Its roof terrace is so discreet, you wouldn’t know it existed if you weren’t standing at the window of the flat directly opposite.
But you are.
And that’s when you see a man up there — a man you’d recognize anywhere. He may be older now, but it’s definitely him.
But that can’t be because he’s been dead for over two years. You know this for a fact.
Because you’re the one who killed him.
Review:
Author Louise Candlish has penned fifteen novels, including Our House, which won the 2019 British Book Award for Crime Thriller Book of the Year and was shortlisted for several other awards, and adapted into a four-part miniseries, Those People, and The Other Passenger.
Candlish, who is recognized as a masterful creator of psychological suspense, says, ironically, that she never sets out to write a thriller or suspense, even though her books have those elements. For her a good book is “a page-turner, constantly propelling you forward so that you have to find out what’s going to happen, but that good apply to any good book. . . . I would hope that any good book would have psychological elements and suspense.” She resists labels and having her work pigeon-holed into a particular genre, describing The Heights as “a hybrid,” in part because it is a book within a book, as well as a family drama. But it certainly is suspenseful and “quite Hitchcockian,” complete with a couple of references to the filmmaker. For Candlish, it “felt experimental as I was writing it.” The story was inspired by Candlish’s desire to explore several themes: revenge; the unreliability of memoirs about crimes committed by the authors; a common phobia; and “the particular horror of a Chappaquiddick form of accidental death.” Readers familiar with “In the Bedroom,” the acclaimed 2001 film starring Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, will “hear its echoes in The Heights.
Candlish’s protagonist, Ellen Saint, is a participant in a writing seminar, drafting a memoir. As the chapters of Ellen’s story unfold, they are interspersed with excerpts about it from a feature in the Sunday Times, the reporter’s commentary adding interesting color to the tale. Ellen suffers from “high place phenomenon,” a common form of vertigo that causes people to experience an irrational urge to jump from high places such as bridges, rooftops or balconies, and figures prominently in the story. It does not mean that the individual is suicidal, but is, rather an intrusive thought and form of mild anxiety, as well as autonomy. As the story opens, Ellen is meeting with a client when she looks out a window and recognizes Kieran Watts standing on the roof of an adjacent tall building called The Heights. She is convinced she is looking at Kieran and equally convinced that the man cannot be Kieran. She knows Kieran is dead because she killed him. “Kieran Watts is the monster who destroyed my life. Whose actions will torment my soul until my dying day, and perhaps even beyond — I wouldn’t put it past him,” Ellen writes.
In her first-person narrative, Ellen takes readers back to 2012, relating how she gave birth to her son, Lucas, when she was quite young. She and his father, Vic, broke up when she later fell in love with Justin, her husband, with whom she shares fourteen-year-old daughter Freya. But they have remained friends and theirs is “a modern, complicated family set-up,” according to Candlish, with Vic living a fifteen-minute walk away. He has dreamed for years of starting a craft beer company, and continues making pitches in hopes of finally inking a deal.
Only when it came to Kieran did she have the ability to disengage from mercy, from the humane and enlightened part of her that most people were more accustomed to.
Lucas is sixteen years old — a strong student with good enough grades to attend a university of his choice, handsome, and well-liked. Ellen loves him boundlessly and is a fiercely protective mother. Foxwell Academy assigns him to serve as a buddy to a “vulnerable new classmate,” the aforementioned Kieran, who resides with his foster mother in a different neighborhood but scored well enough on placement examinations to be enrolled in the exclusive school. Ellen describes having heard tales with “a daredevil theme” about Kieran before she met him, which evoked images of a handsome, athletic boy. Instead, upon meeting him, she sums him up as “short and fleshy, with deep red hair that he had a habit of tugging at and skin bumpy with acne.” Her immediate reaction to him is visceral, noting that he looks at her with a “death glare . . . so deadly, so chilling, I actually shivered . . . ” Ellen is taken aback by her own response to meeting the boy. “It was very rare for me to feel animosity like this — make that unprecedented. . . . And for my nemesis to be a seventeen-year-old boy.” She knows that Kieran, who lacks any social graces, has had a difficult childhood and she should be gracious in her assessment of him, but despite her self-awareness, she cannot help what Candlish describes as “her extraordinary animal response” to him. “She just thinks he’s evil, he’s bad news,” Candlish says. Will her instinctual reaction prove accurate? And how reliable is Ellen’s recitation of the facts?
Indeed, Lucas falls under Kieran’s influence, despite his parents’ attempts to prevent it. Kieran has no interest in college or the future at all, for that matter. He is interested only in taking drugs and partying, and Ellen experiences a mother’s worst nightmare. She loses all power of persuasion over Lucas who begins using drugs, lets his grades slip, and jeopardizes his admission to college.
Ellen’s fixation on Kieran becomes increasingly pronounced as Lucas grows distant and defiant. Both Vic and Justin love Ellen in their own ways and have, over the years, developed mechanisms to copy with Ellen’s anxieties and neuroses. They have found that confronting her with facts and logic is counterproductive so, rather, they appear to be supportive of her machinations. In Vic’s sardonic first-person narrative, he details the ways in which he manages Ellen, noting that he probably should have drafted a “how to” guide for Justin. Although they are also concerned about Lucas, neither of them are as alarmed by his friendship with Kieran as Ellen is, which she finds utterly exasperating. Justin chastises her for characterizing Kieran as “evil,” put off by what he deems to be histrionic behavior on Ellen’s part. He believes that Kieran makes Lucas and his friends laugh and “all kids love a hedonist,” but Kieran poses no real danger to any of them. “What is it going to take for you to start believing me? When something really bad happens, will you believe me then?” Ellen demands.
And, of course, something really bad does happen. The worst kind of tragedy befalls Ellen and her family. Ellen neither believes that Kieran’s version of events is truthful or that justice is served. She wants vengeance, which propels her obsession with Kieran to a reckless new level and she convinces Vic that they must take matters into their own hands. He agrees and they devise a plan that she believes — but never independently verifies — is executed successfully, which empowers her to carry on with life, focused on Freya, Justin, and her career as an interior lighting designer. Until, that is, until her fateful sighting of Kieran on that rooftop that launches her on a manic search for the truth. It’s a lonely journey, because no one believes her when she insists that he is, in fact, alive.
Candlish’s plot is intricately-crafted, inventive, and yes, suspenseful. Ellen demonstrates just how far she will go to hold Kieran accountable for his misdeeds, but is she willing to put everything on the line a second time if, in fact, she is right about him being the man on the rooftop? And what is he doing there? Does he actually live in that tony building? How can he afford to do so? Who is the mysterious man who warns her to stop seeking answers and what is his interest in the matter? And how do Vic’s actions figure into the mystery?
As always, Candlish’s characters are intriguingly multi-layered and fully developed. Vic and Justin are believable as the men who have loved Ellen for years, accepting her as a high-strung, protective, but unquestionably devoted mother. They have always tolerated what they perceive as her quirks. They fail to share Ellen’s extreme concern about Kieran’s potential impact upon Lucas and their family until it is too late.
Maternal instinct is a powerful, driving, and often unerring force in a mother’s life. Candlish deftly portrays the dichotomy between the men’s reactions to Kieran’s influence over Lucas . . . and Ellen’s. She also credibly depicts Ellen’s outrage at having her feelings dismissed and being viewed as bordering on hysteria. She believes her instinctual responses justify her actions, and she will not be pacified until she knows the full truth, no matter the cost. For Candlish’s part, she has been surprised by readers’ reactions to Ellen, a characters she expected would be seen as “crazy.” Instead, Ellen’s story resonates with readers. “I think I had slightly underestimated the passion of parenting now. It’s something we try to have a lot of control over. I think Ellen speaks to that instinct in us. She wants to control everything. She wants to protect her kids from any possible harm. And in doing so, she sort of creates the very damage that she is so keen to avoid on their behalf.” Through Ellen’s story, Candlish examines grief, neurotic over-parenting, and the ways in which her obsession with Kieran and the aftermath of the tragedy impact young Freya and her relationship with her mother.
Candlish’s deviously clever plot is full of unexpected betrayals and revelations, and shocking twists that propel the story forward at an accelerating pace until the very last page. Candlish inspires readers to contemplate what they would do if they found themselves in a situation like Ellen’s — how they would protect their child from harm if they were absolutely convinced that the child was making self-destructive choices and, should the unthinkable occur, the lengths to which they would go to extract retribution. The Heights is another riveting thriller from a master storyteller.
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