a ledge, a lawyer, and layers of lies

When Tate Kinsella got to where the crowd had assembled on the street outside the building where she worked, she tried to push though to see the body in the middle. The woman had fallen from the roof, hundreds of feet up. Tate couldn’t get through the security guards though, and when she said she’d just been in the building with the woman, the security guard asked her to stay.

The police showed up and got everyone under control, and one of them pulled Tate aside to question her about what had happened. She explained that she had met a women the night before at the company Christmas party. She’d said her name was Helen, and she was about to throw herself off the roof. Tate had stopped her, talked to her long enough to change her mind. They had spend some time together talking, drinking, sharing how they’d both made messes of their lives. And then they had both gone home.

The next night, Helen had called Tate, saying that she had lost an earring the night before, when they had talked on the roof. It was a diamond, a family heirloom, and she begged Tate to let her back in the building. Against her better judgment, Tate agreed to go back to the building with her. Tate had gone upstairs to look for the earring, while Helen looked in the stairwell, in case it had dropped there. But Tate never found anything, and then she couldn’t find Helen, so she went outside to see if Helen had left the building (or gotten kicked out by security). That was when Tate had seen the body on the ground and knew that Helen had used her to get back into the building and do the deed she’d been stopped from the night before.

But as Tate told her story to the police officer, she saw the woman’s shoe, and it wasn’t the red high heel that Helen had been wearing. It was a sneaker that belonged to Maddy Blakely, the wife of Tate’s boss Dan, the man she’d been having an affair with.

Tate gets a lawyer who listens to her story and helps Tate navigate the police interviews. It becomes clear that the police believe she was involved, and her lawyer clearly has some doubts about her client’s innocence as well. But eventually Tate is released on bail, as there is no evidence to put her at the scene of the crime. But as the days go by, things in Tate’s story just don’t add up, and the lies are revealed.

But what exactly happened on the roof that night? Who was responsible for the death of the devoted wife and mother whose life ended? And who will pay the price for it?

The Woman on the Ledge is Ruth Mancini’s U.S. debut, and she is starting things off for us with a bang. This story has layers and layers of secrets and lies, deception and calculation. When you first start reading, you think you have an idea of what might be happening. And then you go a little further and it all changes. Further still, and it’s a completely different story. As it unwinds, slowly and deliberately, it pulls you in deeper and deeper, until you have to find out all the details, right on to the very last page.

This is a tightly written thriller, with so many moving parts, and I loved them all. Mancini is clearly playing chess while the rest of us are playing checkers. This story is nuanced and complex, and the truth comes out piece by piece until the final curtain drops. The Woman on the Ledge is as mind-spinning as the best crime writing out there, and I think it will be the talk of 2024. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor and go all the way to the top with a writer whose name you’ll want to remember.

Egalleys for The Woman on the Ledge were provided by Harper Perennial and Paperbacks through NetGalley, with many thanks.