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The Review

Let's Dance

by Frances Fyfield

Let's Dance

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Let's Dance is one of the Frances Fyfield standalones, separate from her Helen West and Sarah Fortune sequences. Isabel Burley has returned to her mother's English seaside house to manage her dementia and to handle the financial-and-practical mess that the dementia has been creating. The house has its own secrets, the mother has hers, and a recently arrived neighbor turns out to be more dangerous than the situation initially appears.

Fyfield's strength is the careful interior work on her protagonist. Isabel's frustration with her mother, her guilt, her exhaustion, and her gradually accumulating understanding that something else has been happening in the household are all handled with the kind of patience that the suspense form rarely allows.

The thriller machinery in the back half lands appropriately. The interior novel underneath is the real attraction. Four stars. Recommended to Fyfield readers and to anyone interested in suspense with serious moral attention.

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