Betsy Treading was convicted of the murder of Linda Sue Murphy, a divorcee and a neighbor on her street in suburban Connecticut, and has served twelve years in prison before she is exonerated on new DNA evidence. In the interim, she has lost everything: her home, her marriage, her job as a librarian. In a show of compassion, another neighbor – the only one to visit Betsy in prison – has offered to take Betsy into her home on Juniper Lane when she is released from prison. Grateful, Betsy nevertheless finds that she must still prove her innocence to everyone who still is not convinced that she did not commit the crime.
Most of the neighbors have since died or moved away, one of the latter being her former husband’s childhood friend, Geoffrey Steadman, a published author going through writer’s block when he moved into Juniper Lane who had charmed every neighbor, male and female, Betsy among them. But she is compelled, even after all these years, to find the real killer. The one constant through the book is that everyone has things they hide, from themselves and others: “All of us carried secrets inside of us, ticking like bombs waiting to detonate.”
Betsy is a woman given to panic attacks and parasomnia [more commonly referred to as sleepwalking]. She has never quite broken free of the effects of her troubled childhood, and has been haunted as well by her childlessness [after having five miscarriages], to the extent that she has given names and personalities to each of the babies she was unable to bring to term. She has many blank spots in her memories of the six years she and her husband lived on Juniper Lane [well, many more than that, but these are the pertinent ones], and as the book progresses she gradually remembers bits and pieces of critical events, including the night that Linda Sue died. The intensity quietly builds up as Betsy, and the reader, realizes the truth, coming only in the last few pages of the book. This is a very different, and compelling, novel, and I will be very interested to read more books by this author [this is her third novel].
