Mysteries and Non-Mysteries 
 In some ways, all novels have something of the mystery to them, even romances. What will happen next? The author builds up expectations, then springs a surprise. But novels where a significant part of the action took place in the past have a double layer: what happened then, and how does that affect what might happen now? 
 I was thinking this almost from the beginning of reading Jan Ellison's debut novel. The title suggests the basic premise: a small indiscretion in the past threatens to destroy an otherwise happy life in the present. There are two time periods. In the past, we have American student Annie Black going to London on a work-study program, losing her virginity, and letting her experiences go to her head. In the present, two decades later, she is Annie Gunnlaugsson, the happily married mother of three, and the proprietor of a small San Francisco store selling hand-made lamps that she creates from unexpected materials. As Ellison tells the story, there are mysteries in both periods: not only the hectic events of that semester in London, which will presumably come back to haunt her, but also an apparently random set of recent events that she makes deliberately hard to piece together: the mysterious arrival of a photograph from England, a new employee at her store, a quarrel with her husband, a disastrous flood, and a car accident that puts her son Robbie into hospital. Even though Ellison is meticulous in supplying dates, it is hard at first to follow the sequence, or to form any idea of what part the past may play in any of it. But that is part of the fun too, part of the mystery. 
 Ellison writes well for the most part, and I found myself enjoying the book a lot, at least on a four-star level, until her mechanisms became too obvious. Here, for instance, is a chapter ending, and by no means the only one: "There was no good reason, yet, for the alarm bell that rang in me, and yet it did ring, and the sound was long and loud." I won't say that there were no revelations worth such a build-up; there was at least one surprise that I simply did not see coming. But too much seemed either obvious, or relatively small potatoes. OK, Annie went a bit wild in London, but hey, twenty-year-olds do. Because none of the men were especially well realized, I found it harder to understand her divided emotions than her prodigality with her body, or to believe that any of her feelings from this time could still exert a pull twenty years later. I also felt that Ellison herself was a bit too prodigal, throwing in one or two more complications (in each period) than were strictly necessary, and relying too much on coincidence and melodrama to make her plots mesh. 
 Another device: the whole book is a letter written by Annie to Robbie. Again, the mechanism is a bit obvious, but it mostly works. What finally confirmed my decision to go down to two stars, though, was a description of sex, the last of several. It was not pornographic but essential to the plot; in a third-person narrative, I would not have raised an eyebrow. But never in a million years the kind of thing a mother would write to her son! Still, the book kept me reading, and I will say this for the author: she kept those mysteries coming right up to the end.