In her cleverly plotted contemporary mystery satire, The Driver's Seat, debut author Abigail Abbas conjures a remote, picturesque setting: an estate in the Scottish Highlands complete with a castle, an orangery, a glass-walled house on the loch, and a mysterious, beautiful marchioness who is not all she seems.
The protagonist is Emma, a sleep-deprived mother whose narration is delivered with deadpan humor. Abbas displays exquisite mastery over Emma's feelings of inadequacy as a new parent. Acutely aware of her shortcomings, Emma mothers her six-month-old baby "like everyone is watching, all the time" and tries to contain the intrusive thoughts in her "hazardous brain cave." Lacking confidence, she tolerates her husband James's condescension and her business partner's betrayal and nibbles on "special chocolate" at night to calm her nerves.
Emma accepts a job as a marchioness's chauffeur in a bid to escape "easily triggered" James and his "evil beacon" of a mother, Hilary. She and her baby flee their cramped West London flat for a gray brick cottage on the edge of the marchioness's estate in Perthshire, Scotland. There, Emma meets Mark, the "hostile and a bit frightening" estate manager, and she engages a child-minder named Shona. (In a hilarious twist, Shona is also the local cabbie, and she's seen around town with Emma's baby happily in tow.) Unfortunately, thanks to a private detective hired by James, running away is harder than Emma hoped.
The marquess is in a coma, and Emma's purported role is to drive the marchioness in their old Volvo limousine to the hospital for regular visits. It seems straightforward enough, but her employer is more interested in visiting a fortune teller than her husband. A beguiling aura of glamour and menace surrounds Emma's unpredictable boss, whose spectacles make her eyeballs look "enormous, like peeled and painted lychees." A party the marchioness throws at their second house on Loch Tay, where "the alchemy of water and mountain" captivates Emma, ends with a devastating fire on the estate, and shortly thereafter, the noblewoman disappears.
Abbas's heroine soon realizes something is terribly wrong at the castle, too, and her baby might be in danger as the marchioness's true identity comes into focus. That's when the raw maternal instincts she once doubted kick into high gear in an action-packed, nail-biting finale, with Emma finding herself, for the first time ever, in the driver's seat of her life. Readers will not soon forget the immensely entertaining The Driver's Seat or Abbas's fearless heroine. --Shahina Piyarali
Shelf Talker: A new mother fleeing her marriage takes a job as a chauffeur for a beautiful, mysterious marchioness at a Scottish castle in this contemporary mystery satire by a debut author.