Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Heat of Betrayal by Douglas Kennedy

A contender for most aptly titled novel of the year, Douglas Kennedy’s stranger-danger thriller The Heat of Betrayal takes its who-the-hell-did-I-marry theme into the extreme environs of the north African desert. Accountant Robin has shrugged off a bad first marriage to plunge headlong into a passionate union with a man 18 years her senior. The red flags are waving and it’s only a matter of time until he does her wrong.

Paul is an artist of unmistakable talent whose productivity has lately been subsumed by self-doubt. Robin, an accountant, entered his life just in time to curb the worst of his financial excesses. Free-spirited and impulsive, Paul thinks nothing of spending $185 on a bottle of wine, but over many years has neglected to give the taxman his share of the cash sales of his artwork.

His appeal to Robin is very hard to see, a problem Kennedy attempts to evade with some loose psychological exposition that posits Paul as a later model of her self-sabotaging yet endearing father. His premature death left Robin with a remote, purse-lipped mother, and Robin is chasing ghosts in more ways than one. On discovering her husband’s genuinely horrific treachery, Robin reflects frankly on her enthrallment with Paul, her willingness to “embrace the bohemian lure, the romantic effluence, the hallucinogenic sex.”

The degree to which a reader appreciates Kennedy’s energetic machinations will likely depend on whether they accept the central premise: that a nearly 40-year-old woman of generally sober inclinations who badly wants a child, and who is aware of the spreading vulnerability of her marriage and finances, readily takes a costly trip to a country to which her secretive husband has a deep, decades-old connection.

The surprises of the storyline don’t come in Robin’s chasing of her erstwhile husband from Essaouira to Casablanca to Ouarzazate, or in mysterious “other women” entering the frame, but in the moments of ambiguity. The perspective is all Robin’s, and the validity of her viewpoint declines as her mental condition wanes. Suddenly, her husband is no more within reach than her father, and her initial experience of Morocco, that between her and Paul there was “a real breaking down of a barrier . . . an honesty and complicity between us that had been overshadowed by manifold demons”, is revealed to be shameless fantasy.

There is no ambiguity, however, in the portrayal of the people of Morocco, who are mostly assigned to two categories: frauds and reprobates, and selfless saints. And there’s no mistaking this tale for a romantic travelogue in the vein of A Year in Provence; on arrival, the omens come thick and fast. Paul’s temporary disappearance at the airport foreshadows later events; a breach of etiquette on the bus to Essaouira turns violent.

Americans coming unstuck in a far-off land; a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown; a cat-and-mouse game; the comfort of strangers. The Heat of Betrayal isn’t Kennedy’s most nuanced work, but it benefits from the strength of a narrative engine that doesn’t let up.