Thanks to Liz Mugavero for inviting me to contribute a guest post to The Wickeds. A post last week mentioned books everyone got for Christmas, and one that I received myself stood out as something worth talking about. Here’s a preview of the book I write about:
The premise of Mirror, Mirror is intriguing: The main character, Peter Hibben, finds in his bathroom “a large, fleshy, terrifyingly lifeless woman on the floor, apparently shot to death by the gun lying beside her.” He recognizes the gun, doesn’t recognize the woman, but as he admits, “trembling, sweaty, nauseating logic tells me that since the lady’s remains repose on my bathroom floor in my own locked, barred, closed-circuit-TV-guarded apartment on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, and since she is semi-clothed in a way that makes it clear she had not simply stepped in off the street, there could have been some connection between us. With emphasis on the physical.”
A locked room mystery then, and as Martin Edwards described it, a “whowasdunin” too. And the book’s structure proves fascinating. As Peter struggles to remember (or admit?) who the victim is and his own role in the death, a fantasy or dream plays out in that bathroom: his therapist and a lawyer (also his ex-wife’s new husband) taking opposing sides in a trial scene, interrogating Peter as well as his family members and others, each new round of questions delving into some new chapter from his past and trying to figure out the truth of what’s happened.
As for what stuck with me and how it circles back to the headline about being “uncomfortable”—well, read the full post here.
