Telling Lies to Alice Book

The entertainment world is stunned when famous comic Lenny Maxted commits suicide on an earl’s estate. Lenny’s fiancée, cocktail waitress Alice Conway, makes front-page headlines when she discovers his body. Traumatized by his inexplicable suicide and by her ill-considered marriage to a philandering photographer, Alice knows she must flee — to a place where the past can’t hurt her and where nobody dies.

That is the first lie. Because there is no safe haven for Alice, who now lives on an isolated farm in Oxfordshire, haunted by vivid dreams of Lenny’s corpse. Seven years after his death, an anonymous envelope arrives containing a newspaper article detailing the grisly discovery of human remains found in a car recently fished out of the bottom of a lake. Alice thinks she knows who the dead woman is. And then, out of the blue, Jack Flowers, the other half of the legendary Maxted and Flowers comedy team, shows up on her doorstep. Alice has not seen Jack since Lenny’s funeral, but her surprise and pleasure turn to unease when she realizes that he is distressed, drinking heavily, and hiding her mail. Then she receives another anonymous clipping.… Someone is telling lies to Alice, playing with her mind until it is impossible to distinguish fact from falsehood. Someone who knows the truth about what really happened on a night six years ago...a monstrous secret that links a time, a place, and a group of friends and lovers. A secret that will put Alice in mortal danger.

Award-winning author Laura Wilson delivers a riveting tale of menace and mounting dread that will hold readers spellbound in its uneasy grip. Played out against a backdrop of illusive memory and human transgression, Telling Lies to Alice ratchets up the suspense one harrowing revelation at a time as it races to its catastrophic climax.

Publishers Weekly

The sleazy glitter of London in the late 1960s and early 1970s provides a backdrop for murder in this third mystery thriller by Wilson (A Little Death; Dying Voices). Nightclub bunny Alice Conway met television comedian Lenny Maxted in a scene out of a James Bond movie: she was speeding along in a white Mercedes Cabriolet and he whipped past in his blue Aston Martin coupe, racing her to a stop. When Lenny visited the nightclub accompanied by the other half of his comic duo, Jack Flowers, the chitchat was full of sexual innuendo. Soon Alice and Lenny fell in love, leaving Jack to his suburban wife, Val. Then, for reasons Alice never fully comprehended, Jack and Lenny split and Lenny committed suicide. The novel opens six years later. Alice, alone in her country hideaway, receives newspaper clippings of a woman's body recently discovered at the bottom of a lake. Alice believes the dead woman is Kitty, a fellow bunny who disappeared shortly before Lenny's death. More questions arise and danger threatens when Jack shows up at Alice's door, triggering memories, telling lies and asking Alice to put on her bunny costume one more time. Familiar elements render this suspense novel less than suspenseful: the beautiful young woman alone in a remote country house, the old friend turned enemy, the secret porno tape, the trail of blood and confessions leading to the denouement. But Wilson has a strong sense of the times, and the portrait of the comedians, individually and as a team, is vivid and convincing. (Mar. 9) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.