THEIR DOUBLE LIVES

An elaborately planned murder at an exclusive New Jersey country club leaves the wrong person dead. And that’s only the beginning.

Kimberly Valva is the world’s most unlikely hired killer. Self-employed graphic designers who make ends meet by serving guests at country clubs and praying to put away enough money for the surgery that would save their ailing goldendoodles’ lives don’t fit the profile. But Kim’s unlikely credentials, combined with her need for quick cash, may be exactly what attracts The Stranger, a computerized telephone voice that offers her $20,000 if she slips a lethal dose into new member Anthony Fuller’s drink. There seems to be just one glitch: Unknown to everyone else, Anthony turns out to be a cleaned-up version of Tony Fiore, the bad boy who was Kim’s first love back in their Brooklyn high school. Kim’s unwillingness to poison Tony leads rapidly to a second glitch when his fiancée, Poppy Jade Walsh, keels over instead. The series of flashbacks that rapidly alternate with developments in the present reveal that Kim wasn’t the only aspiring killer on the murder scene: PJ, aided and abetted by her friend Matt Mazzucca, who’d relocated from Texas specifically to help her, had been planning for over a year to target Tony, who’d killed PJ’s mother in a robbery back in 2006. More threats and surprises will follow at a brisk pace that flags only in the final chapters, when the tale runs distinctly lower on energy and ingenuity, though not on casualties.

Fans will enjoy each wildly implausible twist as reassuring evidence that none of this could ever happen to them.