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Revenge is sweet and not fattening. — Alfred Hitchcock.

As I said in my last post here, humans are hard-wired for revenge. In the past decade, studies have shown that planning revenge stimulates the dorsal striatum, the reward-related section of the brain. In other words, planning revenge feels damn good. I have no idea what the evolutionary benefits of this have been in general, but there have been clear winners. To name just a few:

  • Politicians: “Oh no, Troy, we’re not here to ransack your city, enslave your women, or capture your territory. We just popped over to get our girl Helen back. Anything else that happens is totally on you.
  • Religious Leaders: We have a direct chat-line with God, who told us to personally take vengeance on the [Christians/ Catholics/ Jews/ Liberals/ Churches with large non-taxable assets]. And God also suggests we grab the stuff they aren’t using any more on account of them all being dead. (It’s what we really mean in our pious statements about how everyone else should leave vengeance to God.)
  • Middle-School Students: Well, duh…
  • Writers: every book/play/movie plot ever.

Writers, as a class, are the research-and-development team for the whole human race in the domain of revenge. We ennoble it, we glorify it; we earn our livings inventing wonderful and exotic ways to justify the delicious deed of puncturing the pompous who make our lives miserable. We create virtual daydreams for the masses in which the mighty are humiliated for their misdeeds of oppression against those who are still climbing the evolutionary ladder. It is our job to tend the flames of mythic vision, creating the cultural context in which the arrogant are accurately mirrored and drawn, so that all will know who they are. It is our job to prepare the ground so that the thieves of joy can be reduced to craven, whimpering, pitiful objects of scorn and abuse.”

— David Gerrold, Alternate Gerrolds: An Assortment of Fictitious Lives

 

Revenge — the writers gift that keeps on giving — comes in so many flavors, suitable for almost any genre and setting.

For example:

Revenge can be a Machiavellian plot where all the details are meticulously moved into place until the final design is revealed. A classic example is Agatha Christie’s Murder On the Orient Express where the murderer is… [spoiler alert!] All of them.

It can be a spur of the moment instinctive response by a character pushed beyond their limits, such as the time Darth Vader turns on his master for attempting to murder his son. (Yes, the same son he himself has been trying to murder for the past three films…)

It can be the sweetly satisfying insta-revenge on an annoying frenemy.

 

Sometimes it can be an overwhelming path of destruction, satisfying even though it’s on a completely different scale from the original offense, such as John Wick’s 439 kill count after his puppy is murdered. (Totally justified because… puppy!)

Boudica, the first-century Queen of the Iceni in southern England, was understandably upset when her husband died and his will was ignored by the occupying Romans, who tortured her and raped her young daughters. In revenge, she assembled a rebellion alliance with nearby tribes who rampaged across Roman cities, killing over 80,000 (many of whose gruesomely tortured bodies were mounted for display), sacking and destroying towns such as Londinium (London) which still has a burned layer of sediment more than a meter thick. [NOTE: the above image generated by Canva AI has absolutely no historical accuracy that I can ascertain.]

And sometimes the injury and rage that calls for revenge cools to ice as a frozen fury waits for decades for the exact moment to strike, as in Hard to Forgive, Book 3 in Georgia Rose’s wonderful small town thriller series, A Shade Darker.

Hard to Forgive: (A Shade Darker Book 3) by Georgia Rose


Long held secrets… A lifetime of guilt…
A woman abandoned. Her ex now married. How long will she wait to exact her revenge?
Betrayal, birth, and bereavement. Dora Smith had faced it all by the age of twenty. Alone, she tracks down her former lover planning to reveal everything to him, and his new wife. But with their first child on the way she can’t bring herself to rock their relationship.
Instead, she plays the long game, watching, waiting, wanting him to put a foot wrong. Never dreaming it would take a lifetime.Then, another love is lost. Is this the tipping point that pushes Dora into a spiral of self-destruction. Or, had that been triggered long before?Hard to Forgive is a gripping domestic thriller. If you like character-driven action, suspenseful storytelling and unexpected twists then you’ll love this exciting novel.

My Review: 5 stars out of 5

Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. Dora Smith, the main character of Hard to Forgive, takes her revenge to arctic levels of frost. Her story begins in Chapter 1 with my new favorite first line: 

I usually look forward to a funeral. Prefer them to weddings, in fact. There is less dancing.

Dora presents an unsentimental assessment of herself and her ability to maintain standards. “Spinster of this parish. Ex- school secretary. Pillar of the community. Village treasure.” 

We realize she’s looking from the outside at the carefully crafted and maintained illusion she presents to the world, and that this subtly unreliable narrator is sharing only the version she wants her world to see. Certainly, they are not meant to be privy to her detailed surveillance of her neighbors in the small English village of Melton — and Amos Chamberlain in particular — through her net curtains.

Not that she sees herself as prying, or a curtain-twitcher. “Besides, the curtains never do twitch. Not if you are a professional.” Instead, Dora Smith views herself as a sleuth, practically a professional in the mold of Agatha Christie’s beloved Miss Marple.

As Dora goes about her daily routines of participation in village life, volunteering at Coffee Morning and the village shop, visiting with friends, and attending local events, we get a few hints of the woman behind the image of the oh-so-proper retired village treasure — a glimpse of lace at the back of her closet, of longing for the family she never had. The secret lover who visits on Thursdays. And the gradual revelation of almost half a century of quiet, calculated, implacable revenge.

Hard to Forgive shows us two Doras, young and old, on a slowly converging dual timeline. We meet the giddy young bride, dressing to meet her groom on her wedding day so they can begin their life together. In alternating “Then” and “Now” segments, we share young Dora’s betrayal, heartbreak, and devastating loss.

She reinvents herself as the school secretary and village treasure. The only connection to the young woman she had been is the beginning of each chapter, where she lists the number of years and days since last seeing her lost daughter. That grieving young mother becomes the woman who embarks on chilling decades of silent revenge.

From her vantage point in the cottage across the street from her ex and his new wife and family, Dora records their every movement. She joins any organization they join, attends all the same events, and even gets to know their daughters when they attend the school where she works. Dora’s revenge is decades of coldly unspoken accusation, the never-voiced ever-present threat that what she knows about her ex-fiance could shatter his comfortable family and village life.

I love this charming and helpful map of Dora’s world in Melton.

 

But as the book goes on, we see the toll this revenge has taken on Dora as well. She has no family, her love life is shattered, and her health suffers. She drinks too much, sleeps too little, and begins to lose her grasp on the facade she built while the woman inside it was slowly erased.

I’m absolutely in awe of the decades of silent revenge Dora was willing to enact, even while clinging to the tenuous hope of someday reuniting with the child she gave up. This isn’t a book for readers looking for a cozy mystery or happy ever after. I was completely unprepared for the epic scale of Dora’s revenge set into the tiny village of Melton with its eccentric neighbors and institutions.  The shocking pops of violence, Dora’s unreliable narration as she herself is unable grasp her decline, and the flicker of hope at the very end were all mesmerizing.

Hard to Forgive is author Georgia Rose’s tour de force, a stunning depiction of a woman who thinks she’s handling everything, even as readers watch the cracks slowly grow and begin to spread. And it’s also a testament to the power of something so tenuous as hope, the flicker that keeps Dora Smith alive.

I think that’s the piece that makes this such an amazing book. Even as Dora pursues decades of quiet, epic revenge against her neighbor — convinced Amos is a villain who will someday have to pay for his crime that cost her a happy life as a wife and mother — she clings to the most ephemeral of hopes that she will meet her daughter after fifty lonely Mothers Days.

I can’t recommend Hard to Forgive highly enough. It’s the third book in the A Shade Darker series, each anchored in one month of the tiny village of Melton. The first two books are equally memorable and recommended. (Each can be read as stand-alone, but I recommend reading the series in order as some side characters appear in each book.) The series sets such a high bar, and I can’t wait to see what’s next for Melton.

  • Book Title: Hard to Forgive: (A Shade Darker Book 3)
  • Author: Georgia Rose
  • Genre: Domestic Thriller
  • Publisher: Three Shires Publishing (1 March 2024)
  • Length: 238 pages

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