In Gallowglass Vine departs from the Jamesian reticence she used in The House of Stairs (1989), where she unveiled the crime at the novel's core with deliberate gravity. Here the kidnapping is plotted openly throughout the novel, but its real motivation lies hidden in the twisted mentalities she depicts. The surprises at the end of Gallowglass are produced not so much by revelations of guilt and innocence as by a strange denouement in which the old girl-meets-boy plot line is turned upside down. Normalcy, as Paul Garnet represents it, withdraws from commitment, while whatever psychological disturbances Joe and Tilly suffer only draw them closer together.

The device of dual narrators that Vine employs in Gallowglass allows a constant seesaw between the unholy trinity of Sandor, Joe, and Tilly and the conventional romantic triangle of Garnet, Nina, and Apsoland. Vine inverts the traditional happy ending of...