Review: ‘Dangerous Denial’ by Amy Ray

Troubled pasts abound in Dangerous Denial, the debut novel by author Amy Ray. Few of the characters we meet in the course of Ray’s time-hopping story have happy childhoods: BK’s family shuns her for being overweight, among other things; Lenny is a caustic bully; Trevor tries to survive his abusive father (a grown-up Lenny) without the help of his mother, who ODs under suspicious circumstances. Each of these people seems to find a way to survive and move on; but, as Ray’s tense opening shows, none of them fully escape what they were running from, and they soon find their futures intertwined when they collide in a very public way.

Ray takes a Pulp Fiction-inspired approach to the layout of her story, starting in present day, looping backwards, and then slamming home again for the conclusion. She also incorporates a third-act twist that will be familiar to constant readers of mystery/thriller fiction, but works nicely for this particular book.

There’s a lot of potential here, and it’s clear that Ray is ambitious in her approach to plotting and story structure. My issue with the book is the writing itself; it’s so tentative that it comes across in some places as bland. It’s very readable – the book breezed by – but also very workmanlike, with little of the style or flair that helps authors and their books separate from the pack. My hope is that Ray will take some of the fearlessness she exhibited in imagining her story and apply it to the craft of getting that story on paper.

A lot of people are probably going to enjoy this book. There’s a familiarity to it that will help it go down easy. But I suspect Ray may be capable of more, and I hope she’ll build on that with whatever project follows this ambitious, if not wholly successful, debut.