The Vipers - Katy Hays
I originally received an ARC of this book but the file was corrupted and I was unable to read it. As a result I had to wait until it was released and I could get my own copy to be able to read and review it.
After loving Hays’ debut The Cloisters I was really looking forward to this one. Where that first book is very much playing in the ‘dark academia’ pool, dipping into secret societies and hinting at magic and occult goings-on, this is a much more straightforward thriller. Here’s the blurb:
On the glittering island of Capri, anything can be a mirage. But one thing is true: there's nothing deadlier than a family with everything to lose . . .
The world was shocked by playwright Sarah Lingate’s death thirty years ago at an opulent, white-washed villa on the island of Capri. Absolved of the crime, the Lingate family maintains that what happened that night was a tragic accident. And every July they return to Capri to prove it’s true.
This time, Helen Lingate - sole heir to the family fortune - has a plan. Tightly controlled by her father, she enlists the help of the family assistant, Lorna Moreno, to free herself from her family’s stranglehold on her life. And yet, behind closed doors, the legendary Lingate family unity is at breaking point. Upon arrival at the villa in Capri, an anonymous gift awaits them: the necklace Sarah was wearing the night she died.
In the aftermath, the paranoid, insular Lingates begin to unravel. As the investigation into her mother’s death is reopened, Helen begins to lose trust in everyone around her: her controlling father Richard, drug-addled aunt Naomi, aloof uncle Marcus, and even Lorna, whose past she realizes is frustratingly opaque. And as the family fractures, the long-hidden truth about that night and the secrets they’ve kept from one another boil to the surface - and they might not leave the island alive.
Initially I was really enjoying this. Hays’ writing is strong and her version of Capri is richly realised. The layers of the mystery are stacked together in a way that’s intriguing and made me want to keep reading long into the small hours of the morning, and the ticking clock chapter headers telling us Lorna was going to disappear injected a really nice meta-level of tension into everything.
Unfortunately, once that disappearance happens at around the halfway mark, things start to unravel a little. I’d been enjoying Lorna’s point of view and her character, and to have her suddenly ripped out of the book - even though we know it’s coming from chapter one - was a little jarring. I never really settled into the voice of the new narrator after that point, and felt myself longing for a return to the first half.
In addition to that, I wasn’t particularly satisfied by the way the various threads woven into the first half of the novel are resolved. The book gives us multiple ‘reveals’, giving us explanations of what happened that are later revealed to be false, and it all becomes a bit wearying. I started to feel like I was being told a bit of a shaggy dog story, with twists for the sake of twists that didn’t really mean anything. The novel ends with a pair of revelations that didn’t feel earned, and that made everything that preceded them feel a little pointless.
It’s definitely a fun read, and if I’d churned through it in a couple of hours on a sun lounger while on holiday I think I would have told you that I enjoyed it a lot. But as it is I thought it was just fine, and a bit of a disappointment after a very strong debut novel.