Emma In the Night - Wendy Walker

Emma In the Night was another Book of the Month selection this month, and looking at it, I was definitely intrigued.  The story is about Cassandra, who vanished with her older sister, Emma, three years ago, and has just reappeared--but without Emma.  As an FBI forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Abby Winter, becomes involved, it becomes increasingly apparent that something is deeply wrong in Cass' family.  Cass is clearly orchestrating something, but what?  And where is Emma?

I pegged a lot of the general twists in this book pretty early on.  It's relatively easy to figure out where the holes in Cass' story are, if you're paying even a semblance of attention.  She pretty much admits in the first chapter that she is an unreliable narrator, telling a story that she has rehearsed, and therefore you can't believe anything she says--so when the "big reveals" come along later in the story, they're not really as shocking, because we as readers know that something was off the entire time.  The way that Cass talks about certain things also lays out a lot of what's happened far before she comes out and says what she wants to say outright; the foreshadowing is pretty clumsy in that regard.

But this was still an interesting story; even though I figured out most of what had happened, I still wanted to know why, and that's something that's not as clear throughout most of the book.  It was definitely what kept me reading.  I also wanted to read more from Dr. Winter, because I love forensic psychology-type stuff.  However, Dr. Winter ultimately disappointed me; the daughter of a narcissist, she specializes in narcissistic personality disorder and quickly pegs Cass' mother as someone else with the disorder, leading her to want more deeply into the family to figure out what happened and why it did.  Seeing all of this unravel from Cass' perspective is interesting; from Winter's, less so.  Dr. Winter also puts forth that people are essentially formed by the time that they're three, and she has research into whether or not daughters of mothers with narcissistic personality disorder can break free of the cycle.  Ultimately, she concludes that Cass has--but it's pretty clear that Cass hasn't.  She might not be a narcissist, but there are still things deeply wrong with Cassandra Tanner.  She ruthlessly manipulated everyone around her, ruined the lives of several people to various degrees, led the FBI on what was, essentially, a wild goose chase, and contributed strongly to the tearing apart of her family--all because she wanted to feel powerful.  That doesn't really seem like someone who's mentally healthy to me.  She also blatantly manipulates a psychological evaluation, which should be a red flag in and of itself, and is something that Dr. Winter notices--but dismisses.

So, while the story itself was interesting here, I felt like Walker kind of fell down on the psychological aspects of it.  There is no happy ending here, only something looming in the distance as I worry about what Cass will do next, because she is clearly not as well as we are supposed to believe.  An interesting unraveling, but one that, in the end, wasn't done as well as it was made out to be.

3 stars out of 5.