One feels sorry for Adam Woods when he becomes a live-in assistant to an elderly recluse in Venice named Gordon Crace in Andrew Wilson's diabolical 2007 novel “The Lying Tongue.” After a few chapters, one begins to feel sorry for Crace. By the end we know they deserve each other.

Crace wrote a best-selling novel years before and survives on the continuing income from that one book. He never leaves his residence and hates being alone. He has a mysterious past involving the death of a young man, his former student. He delights in grisly stories about suffering and death. He can't bear for Adam to leave his side for more than a few minutes at a time.

Adam, the narrator, portrays himself at first as a recent college graduate who has recently broken up with his girlfriend. He goes to Venice to write a novel, and he hopes living with Crace will provide him with an opportunity to do just that.

As Adam reveals more and more about himself, however, we realize that he too has a dark past. He raped that girlfriend, for example. The young man lies so consistently that when he does tell the truth, he stops in his narrative to point it out. As he learns more and more about the secretive Crace, he decides to scrap his novel and write the man's biography, the last thing Crace would want. But a woman in England is already at work on a Crace biography, and Adam decides he must learn what she already knows and then stop her from finishing her own book.

Crace, meanwhile, turns out not to be the helpless old man Adam has come to believe, and in the end it becomes a question of which evil will prevail.

Wilson's ending disappoints a bit, although it does have the advantage of being surprising. If one is willing to accept a thriller without a hero, “The Lying Tongue” is a gem. ( )

This thriller has echoes of Patricia Highsmith's novels, although is not as good as them. The main character, a British man who has just graduated from university, is offered a job in Italy to assist a very eccentric old writer who lives a reclusive life in a Palazzo in Venice. Unknown to his very private employer, he plans to write a biography about him. In the process of his research into the old man's life he discovers his very well hidden secrets and develops a duplicitous relationship with him. Although the young researcher is initially portrait as a naive character, much darker sides of his personality are discovered later on. This depiction of the narrator does not work well, it is quite clumsy and it is not robust enough to make the end of the story believable. ( )

This book, The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson, is a psychological suspense story set in modern day Venice but involving a mystery from 1960s England. The mystery itself and the unexpected solution are inventive but some of the plot elements seemed random and irrelevant.

Adam is a recent college graduate who is an aspiring writer. Through a series of random events, he ends up employed by a one-time writer who is now holed up in a villa in Venice. Adam is supposed to take care of cleaning, cooking and home maintenance but ends up working on the author's correspondence and finds what appears to be a blackmail letter. He decides to find out the history behind the letter and ends up in a complex situation caused by lies and deception.

The writing was good in this book and the ending was creepy and strange.

http://webereading.com/2009/04/wherever-i-went-i-saw-question-mark-at.html ( )

The Lying Tongue is a masterful psychological thriller, expertly written to the unpredictable end. Adam Woods, a young college dropout, lands a job with Gordon Crace, a former teacher, author, and recluse. The book chronicals Adam's less than stellar life at the same time we learn bits of pieces of Crace's life. The use of the reclusive lifestyle along with Crace's unorthodox demands on Woods makes for tense and quite spellbinding writing. Although this is not a "feel-good" book, it is wonderful suspenseful writing. ( )

A little like the "Talented Mr. Ripley" in that its set in Italy and one character is trying to usurp the life of another character. It's and easy read and memorable, and that's a good combination in books.