Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun: book review

Lemon (2019) is set in Korea from 2002 to 2019.

In 2002, beautiful young nineteen-year old Kim Hae-on is murdered. Her murder becomes widely known as the High School Beauty Murder.

After seventeen years unresolved, her younger sister, Da-on, desperate to move on with her life, dedicates her time to solving the mystery.

There are two main suspects. Rich boy Shin Jeongjun was known to be driving Kim Hae-on in his car hours before her death. Delivery boy Han Manu saw her in the passenger seat. Both have alibis, but the detectives found no other leads.

The case is told in this novel through three different narrators: sister Da-on, and two female classmates.

As the years unfold, the narrators reveal how they have personally changed since their school days and the incident of the murder – geographically, professionally, physically, and psychologically. Some slightly and others drastically. The truth haunts people in subtle and long-lasting ways, until, seventeen years later, it takes its toll on them, their families, and their relationships. They have to face their loss, guilt, revenge, dark thoughts, and the need to talk – to release their pain.

Extremely well-written, this is more like a psychological thriller than a detective novel. Delving deep into the minds of those were there, what they know and what they want to know, and trying to find out what other people know. Brilliant.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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