A Double Life

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In each of her books, the narrator is on a mission to solve a crime while trying to understand the situation and study the people effected or involved. She always captures her readers with the technique and in depth super sleuthing as if they are involved in the search.

This psychological thriller alternates between the events that happened in the past and the current investigation that Claire has begun on her own. It is a story of class, privilege, deception, and the memories that a child holds about her family. It’s hard to put this one down as Claire inches closer to discovering the truth. Claire as a character is underdeveloped and not fleshed out. She sounds a little unhinged at times, but that may be due to her brother's opioid addiction and her obsessive quest to find her father. Oh, no. The session tapes simply didn’t exist outside of Sony. No one had been able to access those. This has only been possible since all this stuff was transferred to hi-res digital. Sony did that in the early 2000s. That’s the point at which the tapes were excavated by Sony and gone through. That work has only literally just been done.Sometimes a book can capture your attention immediately, grabbing you tightly from the start. Leaving you to fully expect a great read you can sink your teeth into. And sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just cannot get that connection. Unfortunately, with this read I fell into the latter category. Heylin complains in his introduction that Dylan researchers are usually referred to as "obsessives" but Shakespeare researchers are called "scholars". Heylin is a Dylan obsessive, in the best possible way. My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Little, Brown and Company for an advanced copy of this musical biography. This feels like a book confused by its own identity: part of it wants to be saying something serious about the links between class privilege and violence against women; the other half keeps remembering that it’s being filed under crime/thriller so suddenly works in some half-hearted suspense tropes. And the left-field ending comes up literally out of nowhere with a ‘what? who?’ finale. The author mixes the present day search with the retelling of the murder and the aftermath, focusing quite a bit on the time when Claire was 16 and beginning to explore what happened and trying to learn about her father. This thriller has more the feel of a Joyce Carol Oates or Joyce Maynard, with significant character development, and the "thrilling" elements often take lesser importance that the experiences and feelings of the characters. A lot is written about the effect of the crime on the rest of the family. Although Claire is relatively successful as a physician, her younger brother has significant addiction problems.

A better person would for­give him. A different sort of better person would have found him years ago.” Claire's father, Colin Spenser, did a Lord Lucan disappearance as well. His car was later found in a field abandoned with bloodstained seats. Afterwards, Claire's mother moves to a completely different locale with her children. The reader sits with thoughts of Colin's grotesque deed. Was it really Colin or was he set up some how? And where in the world has he escaped to? This novel looks at the aftermath of a crime and how it affected Claire and her young brother. Very few people know the truth about Claire’s real identity. Opening up to others has led to bad experiences for her and so she is very much alone, and lonely. Sometimes, it seems that life goes on, much as usual. She is a doctor in a busy practice, coping with issues, such as her brother’s reliance on prescription drugs, work issues and her obsession with her father. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. He has never spoken to Dylan, and in a 2021 interview with the Guardian he said that he wouldn’t want to: “There’s no point unless he wants to talk to me like a human being and get rid of the Bob Dylan persona, and be just Bob.” You wonder if he thinks he knows who that person is now, and whether writing books of such extraordinary detail has got him any closer to finding out.

Loosely based on the Lord Lucan case, A Double Life follows Claire, whose father murdered her nanny, beat her mother, and vanished without a trace when she was a child. Now Claire is a successful doctor in London, but each possible sighting of her father sends her into such a state of anxiety she finally decides to seek answers for herself. I did really enjoy this book but found the ending somewhat unsatisfying so I have only given it 4 stars! Maybe I will need to read this author’s next book to resolve some of my questions in which case the ending is rather clever! She said she heard noises coming from downstairs so she went to see what they were. When she reached the landing she found her estranged husband with a length of pipe outfitted with tape. Claire is a very successful doctor now and contends with her brother's drug dependency while working. When the police report to her they may have a sighting of her father, she sets out on a mission to locate him first. Philby’s classy second novel is hard to pin down to any one specific genre combining as it does a number of elements but there is no doubt from the ever-present sense of creeping dread throughout that it’s deep into thriller territory. A Double Life examines the actions and consequences of two believably flawed female protagonists whose lives are on very different paths but against all expectations about to collide in the most unimaginable way.

A former tabloid reporter aka professional dirtdigger, name of Howard Sounes, had decided to …go all National Enquirer on the man called Alias. The result : a depressingly well-trundled, semi-literate stroll Down the Highway. Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. Tempted, yes. But I’m not going to. Unfortunately, the sheer scale of the material is such that I’d literally have to start again. I did those books in good faith. I was thinking, “This is it. This is the 600 Bob Dylan songs that we know.” Now it’s 900. There are so many unknown songs that we didn’t know about, if you follow the story through the present, that would be a whole exercise in itself. Not that Dylan himself is given an easy ride. His rampant womanising, heavy drinking, moral double standards and habitual obfuscations are irreverently laid bare. Crucially, his artistic judgement is constantly called into question, as Heylin pours through old notebooks and rehearsal tapes to reconfigure famous verses or reassemble discarded songs, proposing rejected passages and lost takes as “Heylin approved” improvements. Ironically, he delivers such judgements in sentences so convoluted that you wonder whether Heylin himself has ever accepted editorial advice. What he can’t remember is that Dylan didn’t write “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” when he landed. He wrote it three days later. And in the interim, he recorded most of the album. He wrote “Sad Eyed Lady” because he’d run out of songs he intended to record, not because he’d arrive from Richmond and went, “Shit, I don’t have any songs.” Even at the time, he tweaked it.But he’s masterful on Dylan’s Christianity, the three-album period where this agnostic Jew who built a career on subtlety transformed himself into a one-dimensional fire ’n’ brimstone proselytiser for whom nothing was nuanced.