Books: The Couple at Number 9

I have many thoughts about The Couple at Number 9, the first of which is that I need to vet recommendations I get from Audible Books before I buy anything there. It gave glowing reviews and breathless descriptions about the book’s suspenseful, exciting narrative, but it really hid the negative comments. I usually check multiple sources before I start a book, and I clearly didn’t do that here.

My short opinion is I was really engaged in the story, but some elements of its telling were tedious and/or distracting enough that I ended up feeling pretty neutral.

Like Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code), author Claire Douglas sure knows how to spin a riveting, Gothic tale filled with ancient (well, ancient to the year 1980 here) secrets, tantalizing clues, and deliciously jarring plot and character twists.

But also like Dan Brown, she’s never met a cliché she couldn’t slap into her copy over and over ad lazyam. Cheeks are always rosy, old books are always dusty, time is always in the nick of, nouns always have bland, meaningless adjectives (the red scarf, the ceramic mug, the unexpected surprise) … and every book, email and photo album is about to be closed until at the very last second the reader notices something out of the corner of his or her eye that he or she hadn’t seen in the just-finished process of examining it for enormous amounts of time.

And while I’m whining incessantly about Douglas’ fusilade of adjective-nouns, she spends pages and pages rehashing plot points or belaboring characters’ thoughts but she never really takes time to explain the points of her adjective choices.

For instance: She has a character walk through an “arched door” of an English cottage, but she never clarifies why that detail is important to the character, to the world she’s crafting or to her readers. She could say the arched door made the cottage feel inviting and safe against the horrors unfolding in the back garden. Or that the arched door reminded the character of his childhood home, which made him feel extra-comfortable moving into this cottage. Or that the arched door felt like a portal to the rich history the cottage no doubt held (which it very much does).

But no. It was just a door that happened to be arched. He could have just walked through the door and moved on to the more pressing narrative unfolding inside. Wearing his red scarf and carrying his ceramic mug, of course.

The hackneyed writing choices legitimately undermined my immersion into the narrative and the world of the novel. Despite being a lifelong writer and editor, I’m never that picky as a recreational reader—things like bad grammar and stilted language can effectively define characters and settings—so take what you will about the fact that I’ve spent so much time addressing it here.

One more complaint: The things that happened long ago in the past happened in 1980. The story takes place in 2018. That math doesn’t add up because I was in junior-high school in 1980, and that was just a few years ago. “Long ago in the past.” Harumph.

All that said, the story is pretty gripping. It starts with the discovery of two bodies buried in a garden behind an old English cottage, and lives and relationships and families and startling secrets start unraveling at increasing speed from there. As expected, things and people are never what they initially seem to be. Innocent conversations lead to massive revelations. Encountered strangers end up being markedly supportive and helpful or alarmingly devious and violent. Or they sometimes just add color and life to a shared moment. A separate narrative involving the hostile relationship between a son and his father in a distant city eventually becomes deeply intertwined with the cottage narrative.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say whether or not justice is eventually served, but I will say the thundering freight train of a plot ends on a predictable tying up of loose ends followed by a pfffft of another boring, belabored, meaningless cliché of an emotional gesture.

Cleverly though, the title has multiple meanings, most of which don’t become clear until late in the story. So I’ll give it that.

If you like a Gothic novel filled with well-realized characters and dark twists and turns and you don’t get distracted by pulp-fiction writing, I truly recommend this book.

But if silver linings, easy pies and flying time make you a little angry that someone got paid to write them, send me a note and I’ll summarize the plot for you. Mark my words.