Virgin Lies

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

Virgin Lies is the second suspense novel by Roderick Anscombe to feature forensic psychiatrist Dr. Paul Lucas.  You don’t have to have read the first one, The Interview Room, to catch up, though—you’ll be caught up in the suspense from the very first scene, when Lucas fields a frantic phonecall from his wife, Abby, who wants him to use his professional skills to find a missing child—a child who may die while the adults who care for her stand helplessly by, just as their own child did.

Young Danielle McNeely disappeared outside a coffee shop where she made a trip every morning to pick up coffee for the staff of Abby’s social services agency, where Danielle’s family was living.

The only witness to Danielle’s possible abduction was a schizophrenic homeless woman who is a regular on the park bench outside the shop.  Abby wants Lucas to make sense of the woman’s paranoid ravings and find a lead for the police.  The police are less eager for him to be involved, since in their last encounter with him, Lucas was a suspect in the death of a cop.

Lucas’s skills at interrogation quickly turn up two apparently unrelated suspects—the elderly driver of a van who was taking his handicapped wife out for a spin, and the immature, probably developmentally disabled young man who works at the coffee shop. 

The thing is, Lucas knows they’re both lying.  His skills at reading people make is absolutely clear to him that both of them have told the police a “virgin lie,” that first attempt at a cover story that hasn’t been solidified by repeated rehearsal yet. 

But can he and the cops break their story in time?  The clock is ticking down for Danielle, locked away somewhere on this disastrously hot day.

And how far is Lucas willing to go, manipulating his suspects’ minds to force the truth from them?  Abby has no doubts at all—anything is permissible if it can save a child.  Even torture. 

This is a real page-turner for fans of psychological suspense.  Anscombe is also the 1997 author of Shank, a different sort of suspense/satire.  That one’s a dizzyingly clever and twisted story in which a very slippery character, an escaped convict, writes to a tabloid tv reporter to protest his innocence, and the reader doesn’t know until the last page just who is manipulating whom.