Dream Girl

 Laura Lippman has a long list  of mystery novels to her credit.  I love her Tess Monaghan series and her stand alone mystery, Lady in the Lake was terrific.  This time Lippman is exploring the psychological thriller genre with her newest book, Dream Girl.

This book is interesting in that is not so much a scary, heart stopping thriller but a slower moving, look  inside the main character's  head as he waits along with us to see what is going to happen. This book builds the suspense slowly and precisely, each small development at a time.

We meet Gerry Anderson, an author, who at 70 years old has lived a very full life.  He has written a best selling book, has three ex-wives and can remember the number of one night relationships he has entertained. Living in a glamorous penthouse apartment, he falls down the stairs and ends up immobilized in a hospital bed in the living room.  In this dependent state, he now relies on two young women to take care of him.  One, Victoria, is his assistant, keeping his business in order, picking up his mail and his lunch. The other, an agency nurse, Aileen, spends the nights, dosing him with painkillers and sleeping aids.

As he lays there, incapacitated, he starts to relive in in his mind the history of his life that led him to this point.  Receiving mysterious letters and phone calls from the lead character in his bestselling novel, Dream Girl, who Gerry insists is a creation of his imagination, he becomes more and more confused and terrified.  She cannot be real, and he cannot figure out which woman from his past could be thinking she is the real Dream Girl.   The novel moves back and forth between the current situation of Gerry in his bed waiting for another call and the past as he remembers his marriages and his childhood with a faithless father and his loyal mother.  

This novel of psychological suspense touches on issues that we all are concerned about; power and the  control over our own lives, appropriation and influence.   You will be chilled to the bone and sitting on the edge of the bed as you read this mind bending novel.