Book review: All That is Mine I Carry With Me by William Landay

By Philippa Tracy

Who doesn’t love a good murder mystery? I certainly love a page-turner, a crime novel as well as a good family drama searching for some deeper psychological understanding of the main characters’ motivations. This novel has it all. William Landry’s writing is reminiscent of Scott Turow’s 1987 best-seller Presumed Innocent, which, it has been argued reinvented the murder mystery. That book was credited by the LA Review of Books as being, “a novel that helped shape the literary world we live in today”.

As a former district attorney, Landay also writes good courtroom drama. All That is Mine I Carry With Me, is Landry’s fourth novel, and his previous ones have all received critical acclaim.

Like all good crime novels, this starts with a mystery: what happened to Jane Larkin? A housewife, married young to a successful lawyer, Jane had three children when she vanished from her home in the Boston suburbs in 1975. This left her family to agonise over what really happened until her body turns up nearly 20 years later, near a lake in Vermont where the family used to holiday. But that is just the start of further family conflict and a legal drama where members of the family need to choose sides. The story is as much about the psychological impact on the family as getting to the truth. Jane’s sister and her parents firmly believe that her husband, Dan, is guilty. Jane’s children are divided.

The story is told from various points of view, including Jane herself, one of her children, and finally Dan, who decades later is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and is therefore possibly the least reliable of the narrators. Secrets are revealed, along with the emotional fallout of Jane’s disappearance and the accusations against her husband, Dan. We learn that Detective Tom Glover, the original investigator, “mistrusted Dan from the start.” The daughter, Miranda, the youngest of the three children, was 11 when she discovered her mother was missing. Naturally she blamed herself and we see the impact on her in later years. Jane tells us how guilty she feels about not being there for her daughter when she needed her.

The whole book is riveting. By the time Jane’s bones are found, DNA can establish their identity. And the DA has to decide whether they have enough evidence for a murder charge. What really happened is not revealed until the very end of the book. I couldn’t put it down!