As I reached the final pages of Strange Sally Diamond , the Waterstones book chain in the UK announced it had picked Liz Nugent’s novel as their thriller of the month for April 2024.
Waterstones describe the book as an “ingeniously plotted murder mystery [that] combines sly humour with edge-of-your-seat suspense.” There’s so much in that description that doesn’t match my experience, it’s hard to know where to begin.
The plot isn’t all that remarkable and shudders to a conclusion which feels forced. There is an element of suspense, I thought it was pretty low key. As for humour, the novel does have a quirky element but overall the mood is quite dark because of its subject matter. I also didn’t feel comfortable that we’re meant to find funny a person who clearly has something wrong with her.
The person in question is a single woman in her forties who lives just outside the small Irish village of Carricksheedy. Sally Diamond is highly intelligent and a talented pianist but is prone to anger, doesn’t like being touched and is liable to blurt out the wrong things at the wrong time. Her psychiatrist father diagnosed her as “socially deficient” and “emotionally disconnected.”
He father had always told her that she should “put [him] out with the trash” when he died, so when he breathed his last, Sally dutifully tried to follow his directions. Actually she went one step further and attempted to burn his body in their incinerator.
In the midst of the ensuing public and media attention, Sally discovers the truth about her name and her past. She already knew she had been adopted but only now learns that her real mother had been abducted at the age of 11 and held a prisoner for 14 years by a sexual predator. Sally — real name Mary Norton — was the result. Her adoptive parents were the husband and wife psychiatric team brought in to provide round the clock support when she and her mother were rescued.
Much of the plot of Strange Sally Diamond involves “Sally” (she refuses to use her birth name) beginning to emerge from her hitherto isolated life. But her faltering steps towards independence and friendships are hampered by the constant fear that her real father is still alive and has tracked her down.
Between the chapters dealing with Sally’s new life, Nugent inserts the narrative of Peter, a young boy whose father keeps a woman locked up in a windowless room in the house.The two narrative strands come together in the last third of the book.
The character of Sally Diamond is by far the strongest and most interesting element of the novel. Having spent most of her 40+ years at a distance from normal life, she takes her first steps into the world; making friends, taking decisions and learning who she can trust. The big question is whether this is enough to counter the traumatic experiences of her childhood.
With the exception of her real father (the abuser) and Peter, none of the other characters have any depth; they seem to exist purely to move the plot along. We get the local GP who is always on call to dole out sedatives; a racist assistant in the grocery shop just to prove that Sally isn’t the only person who makes inappropriate remarks. And then, to point up all the really loving family life that Sally was denied we get a yoga teacher and her lovely hubby and children.
it’s just too obvious to be interesting.
If Strange Sally Diamond hadn’t been chosen for our book club, I would never have chosen to read it myself. The book clearly has its fans — it won the Crime Novel of the Year category in the Irish Book Awards 2023 and has had plaudits galore from crime/mystery authors like Ian Rankin, Paula Hawkins and Ruth Ware — but I won’t be joining that club
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