Andrew Wilson, The Lying Tongue

The Lying Tongue

Andrew Wilson

Atria, Feb 2007, $24.00, 320 pp.

ISBN 0743293975

Adam Woods has graduated from a university in England and with neither a job nor a girlfriend to tie him down, he travels to Venice to tutor a sixteen-year-old boy in English. When he arrives, his clients tell him they sent their son to New York City to avoid a scandal but they tell him that reclusive author Gordon Grace, who wrote one book that was a mega-seller, needs a companion and an aid.

When he obtains the job, Grace tells him his duties and that he is not to spend much time away from the run down palazzo. Since he wants to write a book, he agrees to his employer's terms. As he gets to know his employer, he realizes he would make an excellent subject for a biography but the man refuses to spend time talking about his past. Adam starts investigating his life, first in Venice and then in England where he learns salacious things about his employer. He has enough proof to blackmail the author into helping him write the biography but Adam doesn't know is that Gordon Grace is a sly and clever opponent playing with him as the subject, one that could turn deadly at any moment.

This is Andrew Nelson's first fiction novel and it is a masterpiece of Hitchcockian suspense, mindful in some ways to the characters of Shaffer's play, Sleuth. Neither Adam nor Gordon are likeable characters but the storyline is so compelling that readers are fascinated by the two amoral antagonists and the lengths they will go to order get what they want.

Harriet Klausner