Now that the residents of Buckingham Palace have changed, maybe it's time for the Queen of Twists to abdicate.
Alice Feeney, anointed with that title because she's so willing to keep reinventing her plots that you're sometimes not even certain what book you're reading, is back with "Good Bad Girl." Yes, there are twists — some good and some so credibility-straining that they may not have been worth the effort required to concoct them.
At her best — as in her debut "Sometimes I Lie," whose (comatose) narrator fibs to us, and in "His & Hers," where two narrators compete to see who can conceal the truth more effectively — Feeney is a lot of fun. Her characters are vivid, the setups are ingenious and the solutions, while not always strictly possible to figure out on our own, are entertaining in an "OK-you-got-me" way.
Feeney at her worst is represented by last year's "Daisy Darker," which asked us not only to believe that every member of a screwed-up family had what it takes to be an inventive serial killer but also that they lingered over crowded crime scenes long enough to scrawl out poems that revealed their inner workings — in rhymed couplets. Nay, I say.
"Daisy Darker" felt like a knockoff of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," so it's gratifying to find Feeney back on firmer ground with "Good Bad Girl," which benefits from its relatable bonds between several mothers and daughters. Nursing home resident Edith doesn't get along with daughter Clio, for murky reasons that date back decades. Clio and Frankie both mourn the losses of their daughters, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. And the less spoiled about Patience, who is Edith's friend and caregiver, the better — but if you want to go ahead and assume she has mommy issues, please feel free.
Patience is a classic Feeney character, in that she's lying about almost everything. Feeney likes to do that thing Ruth Rendell perfected: track two characters with competing aims whose paths eventually cross, explosively. Feeney adds to the degree of difficulty in "Good Bad Girl" by having five main characters whose fortunes seem likely to converge. But her characters are so recognizable and their dilemmas are so well defined that it's a breeze to read.
On the other hand, maybe the aforementioned breeze should have blown away a twist or two. Feeney has become too fond of coincidences, such as the only two people in London who share a shocking secret ending up confined in the same prison cell. It's as if the Brit assumes her readers demand huge plot reversals and, as a result, won't get persnickety about whether they make sense.
The thing is: She's probably right. "Good Bad Girl" moves like crazy and delivers on twists that are believable in a universe where you constantly expect to learn that everything you thought you knew 10 pages earlierwas wrong. It may not be great writing, but it's effective writing, and it makes "Good Bad Girl" a good bad book.
Good Bad Girl
By: Alice Feeney.
Publisher: Flatiron, 306 pages, $28.99.
