What would you do if someone told you your baby would die by drowning at age seven, or that you would be the victim of intimate partner homicide, when your husband is a kind and loving man?
Moriarty grabs your attention immediately and keeps you there until the last full stop. The story is told with simplicity, humour and plenty of endearing Aussie references.
On a delayed flight from Hobart to Sydney, nerves are tested, but on what is an otherwise smooth flight, something extraordinary happens. A woman walks through the cabin pointing at passengers and predicting how and when they will die.
Everyone gets off the plane safely, but some of them will be forever changed; their predicted deaths are in the near future. Moriarty meanders through their lives exposing how each of them deals with their impending fate. The mother of the soon-to-be drowning boy starts him at swimming school, even though he’s only six months old. Each vignette examines the concepts of free will and destiny, of fate and control, of love and devastation.
When the first ill-fated passenger dies as predicted, anxiety rises, a blog is created so passengers can ‘stay in touch’ and soon the unremarkable psychic woman is being feted as ‘The Death Lady’. When two more die, what is the probability that she is right?
The Death Lady has her own compelling story. She is not unremarkable. She is a complex and interesting woman and one who has little memory of what happened that day.
This is a brilliantly constructed tale. My best read for 2024 so far.
Reviewed by Sue Stanbridge
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Liane was born in Sydney, Australia in the spring of 1966. Her first word was ‘glug’.She can’t remember the first story she ever wrote, but she does remember her first publishing deal. Her father ‘commissioned’ her to write a novel for him and offered an advance of $1. She had no agent, so accepted his first offer and wrote a three volume epic called ‘The Mystery of Dead Man’s Island.’ Only volume 2 remains in print.
After leaving school, Liane worked in advertising and marketing and did a business degree. She became quite corporate for a while and wore big-shouldered suits and fretted about the size of her office. She eventually left her position as marketing manager to run her own (not especially successful) business called The Little Ad Agency. After that she worked as a (more successful, thankfully) freelance advertising copywriter, writing everything from websites and TV commercial to the back of the Sultana Bran box.
In her spare time, she wrote short stories and many first chapters of novels that didn’t go any further. The problem was that she didn’t actually believe that real people had novels published. Then one day she found out that they did, when her younger sister Jaclyn Moriarty called to say that her first brilliant YA novel was about to be published.
She enrolled in a Masters degree at Macquarie University in Sydney. As part of that degree, she wrote her first novel, Three Wishes. It went on to be published around the world. Since then she has written eight more novels: The Last Anniversary, What Alice Forgot, The Hypnotist’s Love Story, The Husband’s Secret, Big Little Lies, Truly Madly Guilty, Nine Perfect Strangers and Apples Never Fall, as well as the ‘Nicola Berry’ series for children.
In August 2013 Liane’s fifth novel The Husband’s Secret was released in the US and within two weeks had climbed the charts to become a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Much champagne was drunk.
Liane’s next novel, Big Little Lies debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, making Liane the first Australian author to debut in the top spot in the US.
Liane is now a full-time author. She has sold over 20 million copies of her books worldwide and her novels have been translated into forty languages.
She lives in Sydney with her husband, son and daughter. When she’s not writing she can be found reading, demanding coffee, being taken for a brisk walk by her Labrador, skiing like she’s thirty years younger than she is, recovering from skiing injuries, talking to old friends about getting old, and begging her children for help with technology.
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