The Girl With A Clock For A Heart By Peter Swanson

The Girl with a Clock for a Heart by Peter Swanson is hailed as “an addictive, nonstop thriller—an ever-tightening coil of suspense that grips you right up to its electrifying end” but I beg to differ.

The Girl with a Clock for a Heart by Peter Swanson

Swanson may have created an impressive new femme fatale in Liana Decter but I feel that the main character George Foss is way too gullible. It is the story of a man caught in an irresistible passion and murder when an old love mysteriously reappears.

George meets the gorgeous Liana in their first semester at a small college in Connecticut and they become inseparable. Each goes home for the Christmas holidays. When college reopens,  George receives the devastating news that Liana has committed suicide over the Christmas break. He takes a bus to Liana’s hometown but in the living room of Liana’s house, he realises the girl in the photo on the mantelpiece – the one who had committed suicide – is not the girl he loves.

Twenty years later, he’s the business manager of a literary magazine in Boston. Unmarried, he is still haunted by Liana. On an ordinary Friday evening at his favourite Boston tavern, his life is turned upside down when his long lost lover sits down at the bar and pleads for help. She has stolen half-a-million dollars in cash from her rich old employer who has sent a thug to try to track her down.

Liana begs him to help her return the money to its owner. Despite knowing Liana’s lies and dubious history, the lovesick George agrees, a decision that plunges him into a terrifying whirlpool of lies, secrets, betrayal, and murder from which there is no sure escape.

The story is told in chapters that alternate between past and present, carrying us deeper into George’s obsession with Liana and her bottomless deceit. It is a good read but I just feel that the sometimes bumbling and always-so-gullible George is straining the credulity a bit too far.