A honeymoon away from the madding crowd should provide time for a couple to reaffirm their love and maybe have an adventure or two, even if the trip has been delayed a year. That's the plan for Duncan Lowy and Gina Reinhold in The End of Getting Lost, the intriguing second novel by Robin Kirman (Bradstreet Gate).
Certainly, much love exists between Gina, a professional dancer, and Duncan, a music composer. But inherent in the couple's relationship is obsession, betrayal and more than a few lies. The trip has barely begun when Gina falls at a construction site in Berlin and suffers a head injury. Duncan whisks her to an expensive clinic in Zurich, where she recovers but still has memory lapses several weeks later. She can't recall the accident or her life with Duncan in New York before they left for Europe, though she often feels something is off. The couple, who met while at Yale, moves to various cities, and Duncan's fears intensify as bits of Gina's memory return. Kirman carefully doles out the motives behind Duncan's actions, upping the suspense as his controlling, manipulative nature is revealed. The novel is set in 1996, before cell phones and e-mail were ubiquitous, so Gina can't easily reach out to her father or best friend to find out why they haven't answered her letters.
As their personalities emerge, neither Duncan nor Gina is particularly likable, but Kirman's investment in well-placed twists and several surprising revelations uplifts the couple's story. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer