For some time, I have wondered if Marian Babson is like Carolyn Keene.¹ The number of books Babson has put out over the years is prodigious: romances, mysteries… Dozens of books in each genre. Each time, I buy a mystery by her, I wonder if it will disappoint me through a formulaic style. And each time, I am not disappointed. Some are better than others – even The Queen, Agatha Christie, had her bad books. But, in general, I am happier than not with them.

This one is one of her earliest works and one of my favorites. In it, two American girls visit London determined to cut loose. As part of their adventure, they go off with two thrilling British boys they just met. Things don’t turn out well. One of the girls is set aflame and the other, Amy, is badly injured. The friend who had let them stay with them, murdered. Amy feels so guilty that she is sure that the police blame her, and so traumatized by the whole thing that she spends all her time sitting, looking out the window of the expensive private nursing home – paid for, she’s not sure how – where she has gone to recover.

As Amy looks out the window, she makes up stories about the people she sees going about their daily lives in the mews. A dishonest au pair. The “yellow woman”, an imperious older woman – old enough to be Amy’s grandmother – who lives in a house at the end of the mews. The nursing home’s handsome young gardener who often catches her eye from the garden and waves or winks. A diligent street sweeper, running his daily rounds. She wonders less about the nurse who tends to her, certain that she is an undercover policewoman, set to watch her, to watch for Aaron, one of the young men who took her friend’s life, and who she is certain will return to finish the job.

The book is told retrospectively, starting with Amy in the nursing home then, in the next chapter, switching back to her arrival in England with her friends. This breaks up the monotony of Amy’s observations of the mews and also allows you to contrast the events both from her current guilty memories and objectively, in real-time. It also builds up suspense for the twist that happens a little over half-way through.

Memory is a tricky thing. When events imprint themselves on us through strong emotions, the facts sometimes get jumbled. Edgar Schein² offers a counseling technique, where you ask someone to tell you a story about something that happened, then probe further to get the facts of the story without the emotion, then a third time to get the storyteller to think about what the other person in the story might have been feeling and thinking. Sometimes this helps the storyteller reframe events in a more neutral way, get past their emotions, past attribution errors.

Amy, in this case, is projecting her guilty feelings onto her nurse. And onto her doctor, who she is sure is keeping her imprisonment from her. She’s unable to reframe, too caught up in her own trauma.

And there seems to be something odd happening in the mews. She sees stories – the au pair sneaking out, behaving shadily. The “yellow lady” suddenly transformed into a much older woman, a woman who stumbles down the mews… and then transformed again into something much more horrible.

In the end, Amy has to confront the truth about her role in what happened to her friends. But she finds unexpected allies to help her with that, people with motives of their own…

Great book. You’ll need to find a used copy.

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1. I just googled her and her wiki page just mentions the mysteries so maybe the Marian Babson who writes Romances is a different person. Apparently the mystery writer lived from 1929 to 2017 and her books run from 1971-2005. Very interesting…. But only a single source; I am not convinced… ↩︎
2. At least, I think it was Schein. Someone has been moving my books around and I can’t find the one where it talked about this technique to check the full details. ↩︎