THE IDENTICAL OPPOSITE

In Savage’s thriller, a troubled woman’s grip on reality loosens after her former lover moves into the neighborhood—with fatal consequences.

Paula Hickman has led a difficult life, despite the fact she’s the heiress to a fortune. A series of traumas, including the deaths of her mother and sister in a car accident, her father’s suicide, and the apparent murder of her college roommate, have all taken a psychological toll. She’s now married to Alan, an academic at the University of California, Los Angeles, and she spends her days quietly battling suicidal depression. However, after her old flame, Anthony Mills, moves in across the street, her life becomes altogether more complicated. Specifically, she thinks that she and Anthony’s wife, Hannah, look identical in every detail—but no one else sees the resemblance. Paula agrees to visit therapist Claire Horst who, despite her benevolent approach to her patient’s mental frailty, isn’t at all what she seems. When Paula is arrested for a murder that she doesn’t remember committing, she begins to question her sanity; she had the motive and the means to commit the crime, and she has no idea what she was doing when it took place. With the aid of an acerbic lawyer and the executor of her father’s estate, she sets about clearing her name. Over the course of this book, Savage, who previously wrote The Last Getaway (2019), offers a brisk read that leans more toward dialogue than descriptive prose. Indeed, the author keeps the narrative padding to a minimum, overall, mirroring the lean, noir classics that clearly inspired him. What’s most impressive about the novel, though, is its sensitivity toward mental health. The basic plot, in which an amnesiac protagonist can’t remember whether he or she committed murder, is hardly a new one; see Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, for example. However, Savage’s deft portrayal of a descent into delusion is convincing.

A compelling psychological tale that makes a well-worn formula feel new.