No hero

One feels sorry for Adam Woods when he becomes a live-in assistant to an elderly recluse in Venice named Gordon Crace in Andrew Wilson's diabolical 2007 novel The Lying Tongue. After a few chapters, one begins to feel sorry for Crace. By the end we know they deserve each other.

Crace wrote a best-selling novel years before and survives on the continuing income from that one book. He never leaves his residence and hates being alone. He has a mysterious past involving the death of a young man, his former student. He delights in grisly stories about suffering and death. He can't bear for Adam to leave his side for more than a few minutes at a time.

Adam, the narrator, portrays himself at first as a recent college graduate who has recently broken up with his girlfriend. He goes to Venice to write a novel, and he hopes living with Crace will provide him with an opportunity to do just that.

As Adam reveals more and more about himself, however, we realize that he too has a dark past. He raped that girlfriend, for example. The young man lies so consistently that when he does tell the truth, he stops in his narrative to point it out. As he learns more and more about the secretive Crace, he decides to scrap his novel and write the man's biography, the last thing Crace would want. But a woman in England is already at work on a Crace biography, and Adam decides he must learn what she already knows and then stop her from finishing her own book.

Crace, meanwhile, turns out not to be the helpless old man Adam has come to believe, and in the end it becomes a question of which evil will prevail.

Wilson's ending disappoints a bit, although it does have the advantage of being surprising. If one is willing to accept a thriller without a hero, The Lying Tongue is a gem.