Magpie Lane

By chance, Scottish nanny Dee, the unreliable narrator of this brilliantly orchestrated thriller from British author Atkins (The Night Visitor), meets Nick Law, the newly appointed master of an Oxford University college, who’s in desperate need of her services. Nick, a former BBC director who was hired, some say, because of his useful celebrity contacts, is facing opposition from the academic old guard. His beautiful, young, ebullient Scandinavian wife, Mariah, a restorer of historic wallpaper, isn’t helping matters. Meanwhile, Nick’s eight-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Felicity, has been selectively mute since the death of her mother four years earlier. When meeting Dee for the first time, Mariah burbles, “Honestly, Nick’s right, it feels like kind of a miracle he met you. You’re like Mary Poppins, dropping onto our roof!” But is Dee a benign presence or a sinister one? The answer to that question continually shifts with each new and illuminating revelation about the Law household and Dee’s history. When Felicity vanishes one night, all that speculation comes under the jaundiced eye of the police. Fluid prose, peppered with original metaphors, carries the reader along. This is an intelligent, witty, spooky, un-put-downable novel. Agent: Judith Murray, Greene & Heaton (U.K.). (Feb.)