Books & Poetry

Rushed out as a paperback original in honour of its selection by Richard & Judy, ‘The Abortionist’s Daughter’ is an ideal summer read for people who think Anne Tyler novels would be better if there was a bit more, you know, crime in them.

Diana Duprey was the controversial director of a Colorado abortion clinic. When her body is found floating in a swimming pool by her husband, local DA Frank Thompson, there’s no shortage of suspects. She had a combative relationship with her student daughter, Megan, whose last words to her, after a phone argument, were ‘Have fun killing babies’. Anti-abortion activist Reverend Steven O’Connell was her opponent in life and will remain so in death. And isn’t it odd that Frank, an experienced prosecuting attorney, would make a mistake so elementary as removing shattered glass from a crime scene?

Hyde comes at abortion from every angle. But her real interest isn’t ‘issues’ or plot so much as the psychodynamics of suburbia, where drugs and porn lurk just below the manicured surface, and small deceptions can have big consequences. The title is odd: Megan, though alluring, is a less important character than Diana, the abortionist who decided not to terminate her son when she learned he had Down’s Syndrome, only for him to die at the age of four. (Seeing her mother’s corpse reminds Megan of her brother’s, ‘plumped and rouged and laid down to sleep in his Superman pyjamas’; Hyde has an eye for shudder-inducing images.)

As tense as it is perceptive, ‘The Abortionist’s Daughter’ is a first-rate novel which only slightly loses its footing towards the end.