The Girl In Times Square

The Girl in Times Square is a sequel of sorts to Paullina Simons's earlier mystery, Red Leaves, with more suffering in store for her hero, Spencer O'Malley.

Lily Quinn is a 24-year-old art major whose life is drifting along, disturbed only by her struggle to financially survive in New York City. She lives with her best friend Amy, and works as a waitress. She also plays the lottery. Then one day she wins – eighteen million dollars. This disconcerts Lily, as it upsets her notion of being a person overlooked, mercifully, by fate. If she can win big, what can she also lose? The winning ticket remains tacked to the corkboard in her bedroom, and she tries to forget about it. This is made easier by an imminent crisis in her parents' marriage. Lily leaves New York and flies to Hawaii to try and prop up her mom.

Three weeks later, still in Hawaii and no closer to straightening her mom out, Lily gets a call from Spencer O'Malley, a missing-persons detective on the NYPD. Her roommate, Amy, has gone missing. No one has seen her for weeks. Does she know where she is? Lily is used to seeing Amy come and go without explanation, so she isn't panicked, but she uses Amy's disappearance to get back to New York and out of her mother's unhealthy atmosphere. Detective O'Malley finds her a difficult witness to pry anything out of; Lily simply wasn't that observant of the many strange and troubling patterns in Amy's life. What he does learn has disturbing implications for Lily's family and makes her look on her former friendship in a new light.

The above description makes this book sound much more like a mystery than it is. While the book is framed by the mystery of Amy's disappearance and how Lily reacts to the many troubling pieces of truth that become unearthed, Lily's story is much more about another struggle: her struggle with leukemia.

As a character, Lily is a bit unfocused. She is frequently incapable of concentrating on the life-or-death matters which directly affect her, preferring to ignore things that might be distressing. It's also difficult to determine how her problems are affecting her judgment, because Simons reveals so little about her personal history before this point. She seems like she is a nice person, but she has few friends or interests, for example. Her family relationships are integral to the plot, but little information is given about how she related to these same people as a child or a teenager. The book hinges on betrayal as a theme, but emotionally it falls flat because the reader is given no peek at what things were like before the betrayal.

Spencer is a bit flat too. Aside from his Issue and his hinted-about past, he's a bit of a cipher. We see him mostly in his police capacity. When he does interact with Lily his conversation is limited and his emotional range is minimal. He is attractive and kind and supportive of Lily during her illness, but he's also eighteen years older than her and seemingly an emotional cripple. And he watches Lily for any sign of information about Amy's disappearance, even when he knows it's very distressing for her to reveal certain things.

What the book does have going for it is a realistically portrayed battle with cancer, an intriguing premise, and a nice serving of romance once Lily and Spencer finally break through a few barriers.

Unfortunately, the mystery peters out as the book progresses. Simons maintains the tension caused by Amy's disappearance and its subsequent revelations for only part of the novel. Then the focus shifts to Lily's illness with only periodic updates on the case. Spencer is portrayed as gifted detective, a missing persons wunderkind, but most of the leads on this case he gets through Lily, and ultimately the mystery is solved, not by master detective work, but by a confession. This happens after a last minute, tacked-on bit of suspense that did not fit the overall pacing of the book at all.

Simons also frequently segues into an exploration of the problem of alcoholism which is a problem for both Lily's mother Allison, and for Spencer. Allison's struggle is painful to watch, but not really necessary for the advancement of this particular plot. Neither is her painful World War II history, recounted to Lily at length by her grandmother.

The Girl in Times Square is simply too long and padded. This should be a plot-driven story, but the plot cedes the wheel to another drama a third of the way in. Simons also finishes her story with a troubling and wide-open ending, leaving several characters with unsolved issues and the reader with a sense of foreboding. After six hundred pages of cancer battle, alcoholism, family dysfunction, betrayal, and war stories, a bit more closure would not have been amiss, at least for this reader.

-- Rachel Potter

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