I put my hand to my breast and felt the necklace hanging there. I ran my fingers over the silver tears that felt so fragile even though they were pretty robust, according to Mom. The island grew larger before my eyes and I shuddered as a cold shiver ran down my spine.
I don’t know what it was about Silver Tears that prompted me to pick it up: this is not ordinarily my sort of thing and I may not be the best judge of its merits. I suppose I thought this would be a mindless thriller (and it is kind of that), but I also didn’t realise that it’s the second book of a series; and although author Camilla Läckberg does a good job of unobtrusively catching the reader up with the events of the previous book (The Golden Cage), this may be more thrilling, and the flashback scenes might be more earth-shattering, for those readers who started the series from the beginning. As for me: I didn’t love the writing (and although I lost patience with the plot, I did keep reading to see how it would end) and I didn’t love the overall philosophy (that men are animals and women are therefore justified in doing whatever it takes to make their way in the world). This was just okay, and even though Silver Tears ends on a cliffhanger, I can’t imagine picking up the next in the series. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
As soon as Giovanni had realized he couldn’t use mastery and male dominance to convince her to agree to his terms, the meeting had been turned to her advantage. Faye loved the game of negotiation. The opposing players were usually men, and they always made the mistake of underestimating her expertise simply because she was a woman. Later, when they had to admit defeat, there were two types of men. There were the ones who left the meeting boiling with rage, their hatred of women even more firmly entrenched. And then there were the ones who loved it, who were turned on by her commanding presence and know-how, who left the meeting with a hard-on in their trousers and an inquiry about whether she was free for dinner.
As Silver Tears opens, we immediately learn that Faye is hiding out in a remote Italian villa with her mother and young daughter; that Faye is the billionaire founder of a cosmetics company; and that Faye framed her husband for their daughter’s supposed murder, for which he is serving a life sentence back in Sweden. I’d imagine all of that is covered in The Gilded Cage, so to propel the action of this second volume, we also soon learn that someone is buying up stock in a hostile takeover of Faye’s company; Faye’s ex-husband has escaped from prison; and one dogged Swedish police officer still has questions about her murdered daughter, whose body has, obviously, never been found. As Faye returns to Stockholm in order to deal with the business situation, she must keep an eye out for the ex-husband, stay one step ahead of the police, all while forging a formidable sisterhood with wronged women (presumably characters from the first book), engaging in several steamy sex scenes, and falling in love with a new man. Meanwhile, action in the present is intercut with scenes from Faye’s childhood (in which her mother was routinely beaten by her father and she herself suffered unimaginable abuse) and the lesson learned seems to be that men are evil and chauvinistic, so women are morally free to respond in any way that promotes their own interest and welfare.
She pictured him out there. Once upon a time she had loved him more than anything, perhaps even more than she loved Julienne. Now she just wanted to destroy him for what he had done to their daughter, and for the humiliation he had heaped on Faye. For all the women who had been in her place, suppressed, feeling worthless, who had taken their lives, been deprived of their dignity. Who had been kept as serfs. Exploited. Women who were still shackled, even if the appearance of those shackles had changed over the centuries.
Silver Tears doesn’t really pass a credibility test (could Faye really successfully hide her daughter in Italy — even calling and facetiming her from Sweden — while at least one police officer doubted she had been murdered?), but I concede that the details of thrillers don’t always need to add up. My bigger problem was Läckberg’s bizarre version of feminism: All of her female characters are gorgeous, and while they bristle at the men who would treat them as sex objects, they (and especially Faye) are happy to use their sexuality to their advantage in business situations, to come onto younger, less powerful men (which, of course, delights the men in this reversal of power dynamics), and to justify criminal behaviour if it protects their own interests (forget about setting up her husband for the “murder” of their daughter, Faye does much worse in this book and I suppose we’re supposed to cheer the girl power?) Not for me, even if the “mystery” kept me reading to the end.
