THE NIGHT BUS

We first meet Cath Tolland as an anonymous passenger on the night bus to Florida, traveling in a deep personal fog that eventually lands her in a hospital emergency room. Once she’s identified there, her sister-in-law Yvonne arrives from Connecticut to restore her to her husband Derek, the musician-minister she had stabbed before amnesia and flight took over. As her recovery commences at home, Cath gradually becomes aware of many things: the old house with the garden she loves, left to her by her Aunt Elizabeth; the sacred music she used to sing with Derek’s church choir; her near certainty of her husband’s infidelity; the tragic deaths of two young women connected to him. She visits her lawyer Luc Beausoleil to find that Aunt Elizabeth’s legacy has multiplied, making her rich. Through Luc, she hires a detective agency to look further into the deaths that so disquiet her. In time, however, relations with Derek improve to the point of their spending a few days together at Derek’s cabin in the woods. It’s here, in this bucolic but isolated setting, that Cath faces a struggle for her life, and here that all her questions are finally answered.

Law (Cross-Check, 1997, etc.) powerfully evokes Cath’s uneasiness and rising tension, all in a narrative style sometimes verging on the poetic but always suspenseful. A superior performance, inarguably the author’s best to date.