“They welcomed you in. And now you’re trapped”
- Book: The Wrong Family
- Location: Lake Tahoe (Nevada), Sacramento
- Author: Ellery Kane
My recent reading seems to have been almost exclusively made up of this style of domestic psychological thriller, where the many strands of the story don’t dovetail together until almost the very final page of the book. They also almost always feature a cast of characters I can’t fail to dislike and distrust. ‘The Wrong Family’ caters for both of those scenarios in spades and if this is my first Ellery Kane novel, then it most definitely won’t be my last!
Even in beginning to give a taster of this twisted storyline, it is going to be difficult to avoid spoilers, so here goes nothing…
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Hallie Sherman, is a twenty-eight-year-old waitress, living hand to mouth in a rundown apartment in Sacramento. Her life so far hasn’t been easy, as she never knew her birth father, only his name and the fact that her mother told her he was no good and didn’t want them. Her mother had suffered with various addictions, making her an unreliable parent. So, following a horrific car accident in which she had been killed and Hallie herself had faced life changing injuries, a nine-year-old Hallie had spent the remainder of her childhood in the care system, pushed from foster home to foster home, where she lied, cheated and stole in a desperate attempt to fit in. Her dream to become a chef was shattered when her meagre reserves of cash ran out before her training had really begun, so waiting on table in a two-bit diner, with the occasional cover for kitchen staff absences, looked set to be her life. That is until Hallie, determined not to have her boss bullied and frightened by an irate customer, loses her cool, her job and probably her freedom should she be captured!
An insecure Hallie has, however, been trying to trace her father through a company called Family Ties who have been DNA matching for potential candidates, with Hallie herself having written over one hundred letters to every Robert Thompson she could find listed, who fitted her father’s description. She is therefore amazed and elated when one email from a particular Robert Thompson reaches her when she is at her lowest ebb, with him purporting to be her father and inviting her to visit himself and his family at their home on the shores of the lovely Lake Tahoe, where they own and manage an upmarket lakeside restaurant. Hallie uses much of her ill-gotten gains to buy some designer clothes and accessories, which she hopes, together with the elaborate tissue of lies she has prepared, will help her fit in to the lofty circles the Thompson family seem to circulate in.
From the time Hallie arrives on the outskirts of Incline Village, it is not clear where truth and lies meet and overlap, from both Hallie’s perspective and that of her new found family, who seem all too keen to accept that she is their long-lost daughter, step-daughter and step-sister, without question. Then, little by little, things begin to unravel spectacularly, as everyone begins to reveal themselves in their true colours and Hallie fast comes to realise that she is not the only one who is hiding huge secrets, telling lies of cringeworthy proportions and might well find themselves on the wrong side of a prison cell door, if the truth ever came out!
Bad, dangerous and potentially deadly things begin to happen, which at first appear to be coincidental random accidents, escalating out of proportion into terrible acts of familial jealousy, but which eventually the family, with the exception of her father, are all too quick to blame on Hallie, doing little to ease the underlying latent tension with which their false aura of domestic bliss is imbued. Hallie can’t work out who, if anyone, she can trust, especially when Family Ties contact her with news she hadn’t ever expected to receive. She believes she has an ally in Nick, the chef at the family restaurant, however he is the only person who knows just about all of her secrets (well, almost all!), so how much can she really rely on his silence and his professed belief in her? And what about Jay, the homeless youth who is hiding in the wooded area behind the restaurant, whom Hallie, recognising him as a kindred spirit, has befriended, perhaps too quickly, too trustingly and too deeply?
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How multi-layered, intense and claustrophobic can one storyline become and still appear credible? Author Ellery Kane pushes things right to the very limit, where I was beginning to wonder just how many more incidents could happen to, and be instigated by, one family, without reaching and passing the limits of incredulity. Her timing however, is perfection and the way in which the many twisted strands of the storyline are drawn together, yet little is truly revealed until the last couple of chapters, is tantalisingly frustrating.
The many chapters of this well constructed, multi-layered storyline are short and well-signposted, narrated in the third person and interspersed with several email communications from Hallie’s contact at Family Ties, together with a few of the rejection replies she had received in response to the several dozen letters she had written to the many Robert Thompsons she had tracked down. The narrative is punchy, although there is throughout, a tense atmosphere which threatens to overwhelm and suffocate just about anyone Hallie, or her new found family, come into contact with.
There are also many social mores and their potentially life-changing consequences, which come into play and are held up for scrutiny during the course of this story and which I felt author Ellery Kane dealt with sympathetically and with well considered empathy, whilst still laying things on the line truthfully, never sugar-coated, and always in the cold light of day. Perhaps I might have felt some keen sympathy with Hallie’s plight during her formative years, when addiction leading to the death of a parent, a childhood spent in the care system and the lack of any moral support when that system was abruptly removed on attaining perceived adulthood, all contributed to the brash, fearless, but obviously vulnerable person she had become; added to which, how deeply she had become caught up in the DNA process to track down a father she desperately hopes is going to welcome her into his life with open arms. Or even that Nick found himself, through lack of funded social care, single-handedly trying to care for a parent with dementia, whilst holding down a demanding job with long and unsociable hours. However, that was where my interest in everyone’s ills and woes, rather waned. The perceived tragedies of the Thompson family themselves, whilst many and sad, were of a much more self-induced and selfish nature, which bordered on the criminal, never really moved me and did not deserve my sympathy, although perhaps son Logan’s desperate need to earn and receive his father’s love and respect was to be pitied.
This quite large and disparate cast of characters really didn’t endear themselves to me in any way, shape or form, so there was never a burning need for me to know what became of them going forward, as I’m sure they would have moved on and re-invented themselves, almost unscathed, leaving behind in their wake a trail of despair and sadness. The last time I met Robert, he came across as contrite and broken, sincere and penitent about the fate which had befallen Hallie, but how much of that was simply paying lip service to her situation, whilst milking his own self-pity, I still couldn’t be certain.
Despite its real dual locations of Sacramento, California and Lake Tahoe, Nevada, the true distance covered in this story was actually quite limited. Although, as an avid armchair traveller, both were new to me places, so I enjoyed my trip and the visions which were conjured up for me. Particularly around the area of Incline Village on the beautifully picturesque shores of Lake Tahoe, where author Ellery Kane definitely took full advantage of the palette of words at her disposal to paint then bring to life, the essence of a place I could almost imagine myself stepping into, so much so that I even found myself checking out homes for sale in the area – as you do!
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