Through the dust motes dancing on the sunbeams George spies the dream his life once was and he imagines can be again: back together with the college crush he never got over. So opens Peter Swanson’s first novel with our protagonist not quite believing his eyes that the love of his life is, a couple of decades after he last saw her, sitting across the bar from him on apparently completely unaware of his presence. The fact that the relationship ended very badly with him embroiled in double murder the first time round does not seem to hold him back this time – it is as if George’s life has been on hold during the course of the intervening years. While moderately successful in his professional life, he has been unable to commit to his sometime girlfriend. He occupies his time endlessly replaying the events of his freshman year in college, where he met is erstwhile love Liana Dector. When she walks back into his life it is as if the electricity that once animated his every thought is restored all of a sudden and he is at her mercy once again.
He agrees to do a favor for her and finds himself at the heart of yet another murder mystery featuring the larger-than-life Liana: did she or didn’t she? It is a case of déjà vu all over again for George and the remainder of the book sees George alternately re-enact his first go-round with Liana twenty years earlier balanced now against her abrupt reappearance. The question at the heart of this novel has to do with whether George can get past the memory of the terrific affirmation and later destruction present as one and the same in the throes of first love:
George had imagined this moment many times but had somehow never imagined the outcome. Liana was not simply an ex-girlfriend who had once upon a time broken George’s heart; she was also, as far as George still knew, a wanted criminal, a woman whose transgressions were more in line with those of Greek tragedy than youthful indiscretion…George felt the equal weights of moral responsibility and indecision weigh down upon him.
The story of George’s earlier encounter – to call it a “relationship” might be a bridge too far – with Liana is slowly retold through the remainder of the novel. We see George, at his first semester in college, falling head over heels in love with a girl he knew as Audrey, then mourning her when he learns she she’s killed herself on Winter break in Florida.
Thinking back, George recalls visiting Audrey’s parents only to find that their version of “Audrey” is not the woman he knew at college: the young lady that had recently taken leave of life by her own hand is in fact the real Audrey Beck and not the imposter he knew by the same name. George’s encounter with a local detective investigating the circumstances of Audrey’s demise leaves him with little doubt that a murder investigation is underway in which Liana/Audrey has been identified as the prime suspect.
Under normal circumstances you would expect George’s first reaction upon encountering Liana again would be to call the police. The fact that he does not taken together with the fact that Liana knows beforehand he won’t indicates that they both know that, for George, this is a chance to unlock the mystery of who he was twenty years ago and why he fell for her more deeply than anyone before or since. The only thing certain in all of this excessively maudlin introspection is that poor George is hopelessly out of his league: he is a lightweight in all of this, an easy ‘mark’ for Liana who not surprisingly is involved with some very dangerous people.
While never explicitly verbalized it is clear that both Liana and George have signed on to a quid pro quo straight out of the noir playbook: George agrees to deliver a sum of money to Liana’s former boss in return for her picking up where she and George left off a couple of decades earlier.
The way the author handles the night that Liana and George subsequently spend together does not disappoint: all of George’s long since locked-up hopes and dreams find release in a physical encounter all the more heated and charged with significance because it dares to mimic an earlier version of the same. For an instant we see the flickering truth of what George knew all along: despite her multiple identities, her efforts to cartwheel though character after character without ever staking a claim to any version of herself, there was a moment in time that stopped all the clocks when she loved George too and he saw and accepted her for what she was
I had become this different person, this person I’d rather have been—you know, in school, doing well, with a boyfriend, a boyfriend like you—but it was like I had a secret disease, or there was this clock inside of me, ticking like a heart, and at any moment an alarm would go off and [the girl I was then] would no longer exist. She’d die and I’d have to go back to being Liana Dector.
Unfortunately for George, mere love does not have the power to transform Liana’s addiction to a life lived in thrall to big con and it is clear well before the end that Liana has played George once more.
