Sarah Pekkanen’s “The Locked Ward” is an Escapist Thriller https://ift.tt/GW7nXwP
The first thing I noticed about Sarah Pekkanen’s new psychological thriller The Locked Ward is her use of second person point-of-view for one of the two alternating narrators, Georgia Cartwright.
“You awaken slowly,” Georgia tells us, “struggling to surface, like you’re swimming up through mud.”
And just like that, we the readers, like Georgia, are waking up in a psychiatric institution, surrounded by nurses and orderlies and other patients, feeling confused, scared, perhaps even paranoid.
Pekkanen is the co-author with Greer Hendricks of The Golden Couple and The Wife Between Us, and for the latter, she also co-wrote the screenplay.
I enjoy reading multiple perspective thrillers (such as those by Alice Feeney, Ruth Ware, and Lucy Foley), and second person is an unusual and bold stylistic choice. In general, it creates immediacy, intimacy, and makes the reader feel more involved in the story. But it’s notoriously hard to do well.
What makes it work for me here is that second person helps us identify with Georgia, we feel her fear and her disorientation in her new surroundings, and we question whether she might, in fact, be disassociating due to trauma. Could the second person point-of-view reflect Georgia’s fracturing identity?
Perhaps. But there is something unnerving about Georgia that has us second-guessing her reliability.
“I didn’t do it. And if you don’t get me out of here, they’re going to kill me,” she tells Mandy, who comes to visit her.
Amanda Ravenel (Mandy) is our second narrator and Georgia’s biological twin sister, and they only just recently learned about the existence of each other.
But it’s not Georgia’s declaration — that she didn’t murder her younger sister, Annabelle, the biological daughter of the Cartwrights, her adoptive family — that surprises us most. It’s her self-awareness, her deliberate effort to control what Mandy and others think of her state of mind. Before she even makes her declaration, she coaches herself: “You need to play this moment carefully … You keep your facial muscles slack, your voice and body devoid of expression.”
Georgia seems to be playing a part. “Staying in character.” Why? To stay out of jail? Are her fears on the ward founded? Or is she, in fact, as diabolical as her alleged crime would have us believe?
Mandy is as uncertain as we are. Seated across from Georgia, she doesn’t buy her sister’s performance. “She’s lying. I just saw proof … as her eyes fixed on mine, I saw complete awareness in them.”
It’s these twists and turns, this back-and-forth between twin sisters, that make The Locked Ward engaging, that make us feel delightfully off-kilter as we read.
The story is fun and fast-paced, with short chapters that flip perspectives between Georgia, a well-to-do wedding planner, and Mandy, a bar owner. Mandy is the more active protagonist, as she is “on the outside.” While Georgia tries to keep a low profile and stay safe in the “alien world” of the ward, Mandy picks up the pieces of Georgia’s shattered life, trying to figure out not only who Georgia is but also what happened to Annabelle.
Her sleuthing takes her down unexpected paths as she delves into Georgia’s secretive and powerful adoptive family and starts to unravel the circumstances of her own birth and adoption. The danger to the sisters escalates with the involvement of a private investigator, a mysterious “fixer,” a thumb drive, and a highly connected U.S. senator from North Carolina.
Despite the rather late introduction of a key figure (the senator’s older son) and the petering out of a red-herring stalking subplot, The Locked Ward is escapist and entertaining. Regular thriller readers will be able to puzzle out some things, but there will be surprises. Appearances, after all, can be deceiving to characters and readers alike.
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