March 2020

I listened to Diane Chamberlain's BIG LIES IN A SMALL TOWN, read by Susan Bennett --- and the auditory experience was terrific. It’s set in a small southern town in North Carolina in two different time frames: 1940 and 2018.

In 1940, a young woman named Anna Dale from Plainfield, New Jersey, is hired to paint a mural for the Edenton, NC post office. She is the winner in a national contest where murals are to be hung in local areas to showcase appreciation of the towns. Her life is lonely; her mom recently passed away, so she jumps at this opportunity. What she does not know is how the town she is going to be working in is harboring deep prejudices and animosity toward her as an outsider. The mural is neither finished nor hung, and is long forgotten by many.

In 2018, Morgan Christopher is brought in to restore the mural and to finish it. She is on parole for a crime she did not commit, and this opportunity presents a way to get her life back on track. Though she is an artist, she has no restoration skills. So why was she tasked with this project? She works her way through it with a deadline that seems impossible at first. As she works, there are things in the mural that disturb her. What is she seeing, and why did Anna put them there?

And there is an outstanding question: What happened to Anna Dale? Diane does a wonderful job of sharing the history and ratcheting up the tension.

I completely missed one connection in the book that I am not going to give away. I am wondering if I would have caught it in print, or if my ears let me down. Trust that it did not impact my enjoyment of the book. In fact, when the realization of what was going on popped into my head as I was driving at some point on the New Jersey Turnpike, it was rather amusing. I wondered, "HOW did I miss that so far?"

The pacing is well done, and the ending had some things I did not foresee. It would make for an interesting book group discussion.