My first introduction to Louise Candlish’s fiction was her 2018 novel, OUR HOUSE. At the time, I remember being impressed and consistently set on edge by her innovative narrative techniques, which played with chronology, perspective and form in ways that kept readers guessing. So I was eager to pick up her latest book, THE HEIGHTS, which was inspired, at least in part, by the movie Vertigo and promised --- based on the opening pages alone --- to offer more of the same intriguing experiments with narrative structure.

"[T]hose who stick with [THE HEIGHTS] certainly will be rewarded with a novel whose twists only grow twistier."

In THE HEIGHTS, the framing story is a feature article, a human-interest story of sorts, written for the Sunday Times magazine near the end of 2021. In that article, which readers get snippets of throughout the novel, journalist Michaela Ross introduces us to a workshop for writers “designed to explore the impact crime has had on their lives.” We then dive right into the manuscript of one of those writers, Ellen Saint, who tells her own story in fully confessional style.

Ellen is clearly an accomplished writer, as she begins with quite the hook. A lighting designer, she recounts how she was visiting a prospective client in an up-and-coming London neighborhood. Glancing across at the high-rise building opposite her client’s apartment, Ellen is shocked to see a man she never expected to see again --- because she had him killed several years earlier.

Ellen’s story fills out through a combination of flashbacks to the time when her son, Lucas, and that young man, Kieran, were high school friends, as well as more contemporary scenes of Ellen trying to piece together how and why Kieran is still alive --- and why he’s living at this fancy address under an assumed name. Readers learn exactly who Kieran was then and why Ellen was bent on revenge.

This first half of the book is suspenseful yet straightforward enough. But that all starts to change when the perspective shifts to Ellen’s former partner and Lucas’ father, Vic. He, in turn, gives his version of the story, one that substantially calls into question Ellen’s narrative --- and brings to light factors of which she herself could not possibly have been aware. This tradeoff of perspectives continues --- to, at times, shocking effect --- right up to the very last page.

I do think that Candlish spends a bit too long on Ellen’s point of view. Readers expecting the kind of narrative wizardry for which she has become known might grow somewhat tired of the relatively unremarkable series of events with which the book’s first half is concerned. However, those who stick with it certainly will be rewarded with a novel whose twists only grow twistier.