The old adage, ‘write what you know’ is sometimes hard won wisdom that authors come around to after years of frustration falling short in other efforts, but Hilary Davidson has seized on it right out of the gate. Davidson’s debut novel Damage Done is far from her first book, though. She is the author of eighteen nonfiction books, mostly travel guides, as well as numerous articles in magazines ranging from Martha Stewart Weddings to Harpers to Canadian Living. She’s been a journalist, adventurer and travel writer traveling the world for years all the while, honing her fiction chops in short stories, (check out the chiller Anniversary from A Prisoner of Memory, or Son of So Many Tears from Blood, Guts, & Whiskey). Lily Moore, the heroin of The Damage Done is herself a travel writer, called home to New York City from Madrid one night after her troubled, younger sister’s body is discovered possibly drowned in a bathtub.
Claudia Moore, we learn was a junkie and petty thief in and out of trouble with the law, in and out of rehab and in and out of the lives of various and nefarious men her whole life. And the sisters’ mother, it turns out, was a suicide as well. There are too many similarities between the circumstances of mother and daughter’s demise for Lily to dismiss it as a simple suicide. And after she’s goes downtown to ID the body, the police begin to agree with her.
This is good old fashioned mystery writing – characters hashing out theories at length, exposing secrets, making sport of literally life and death situations – the kind Agatha Christie might write today meant to work in multiple mediums, stage, page and cinema simultaneously. But the secrets revealed, the motives exposed and the uh Damage Done strike me as juuuust a shade darker than those of the average Marple case.
Along the way, Davidson throws in details only a travel writer, foodie, fashion enthusiast or classic movie lover would notice, as well enough red herrings to stock a fish farm, throwing the reveals, twists and reversals about like so much confetti until we arrive breathlessly at the end. And I wont spoil that for you. You’ll have to get there yourself.
This is a terribly assured debut from someone I think we’ll be reading for a long time.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
