In "Someone's Listening" by Seraphina Nova Glass, protagonist Faith Finley seems to have everything going for her. She’s a psychologist with a thriving practice, a bestselling author, and the host of a popular radio program. Her handsome husband, Liam is a successful food critic.
The book whips open with a brief prologue where we learn that Liam is missing. Gone without a trace. But the detectives don’t believe Faith’s story about her lack of involvement in the disappearance. They think she’s hiding something or that there was no Liam with her the night he supposedly disappeared. That means Faith is losing her grip on reality. But is she?
Cut to chapter one where Faith starts the day pouring herself a glass of white wine and holding to a precarious resolve to wait until noon before she starts imbibing. Then she considers vodka gimlets for later that afternoon. This is not an auspicious start for our protagonist whose charmed life is unraveling as she sets about to solve this evolving conundrum about her missing husband.
"Someone's Listening" is Seraphina Nova Glass’s debut novel, but she’s already an award-winning playwright and a screenwriter. The novel is an addictive psychological thriller. It might put you in the mind of novels of this ilk like Paula Hawkins’ "The Girl on the Train" or Liane Moriarty’s "Big Little Lies." This is one of those stay up past-your -bedtime-just-one-more-chapter kinds of books.
It’s true that Faith is a self-medicating unreliable narrator. She drinks. A lot. But also true is just how easy it is to follow her point of view and anything she says to get through these dreadful situations we experience with her.
Things go from bad to worse for Faith. There is this simmering ambiguity about just how innocent she actually is in this mystery. Is her memory reliable or is it clouded by her drinking problem and is she in fact involved in some way in Liam’s disappearance? Does she have an even more nefarious responsibility to bear?
Faith Finley, for all her flaws, is still an astute psychologist, so we also get to probe the minds of this cast of troubled characters she encounters through the spellbinding conclusion of "Someone’s Listening" by Seraphina Nova Glass. It’s published by Graydon House.
Yvette Benavides can be reached at bookpublic@tpr.org.