A harmless page-turner.
A Manhattan makeup artist signs up for a study about morality and ethics that takes her deep into the danger zone.
Using the addictive split narration gambit deployed in their debut, Hendricks and Pekkanen (The Wife Between Us, 2018) tell another tense tale of two female characters. Jessica is struggling to get by in New York City with a job doing makeup sessions in clients' homes. When she overhears that some ditzy college girls she's working on have signed up to take a psychological survey for $500, she breaks into their voicemail while they're out of the room to get the information, then pretends to be one of them when she arrives at the appointment. (Why she didn't just ask them about it we'll never know.) Ironically, the survey contains questions like "Could you tell a lie without feeling guilt?" and "Describe a time in your life when you cheated." Turn the page, and now we're watching Jessica from the other side, from the perspective of the immediately rather creepy researcher, Dr. Lydia Shields, who is already aware of her subject's deception. "This test can free you, Subject 52," she is thinking. "Surrender to it." We quickly learn the survey is just a front for recruiting a susceptible young woman to act as bait in some nefarious schemes Dr. Shields has planned...schemes which may have already led to the death of a woman known as Subject 5. Almost nothing about this story or its characters is believable or makes much sense, from Jessica's naiveté to Lydia's sociopathic tendencies to the awful and life-changing bit of personal history they share. Leave that aside, though, and you can still have a bit of fun watching their game of cat and mouse play out.
A harmless page-turner.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-13373-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Art forgery! False identities! Adultery! Murder! But in the end, sadly, it’s more melodrama than true thriller.
When a skull is discovered in the lake by a manor house, a 30-year-old mystery comes to light.
When Jo’s husband dies suddenly, she reluctantly brings her 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, home to Lake Hall. Despite the seeming affluence of her aristocratic family, Jo’s memories of her childhood are mostly unhappy, especially after her beloved nanny, Hannah, left under mysterious circumstances. Despite her mother’s frosty warnings, Jo takes Ruby out on the lake one day, and they unearth a human skull. The detective who comes to investigate has a chip on his shoulder about the upper class and would like nothing better than to prove the village rumors that the Holt family has casually disposed of inconvenient bodies throughout the years. Jo’s mother knows exactly to whom the skull belongs—and she wants to keep the truth from Jo as long as possible. Jo herself suspects it might belong to Hannah, who never would have left her voluntarily—but then suddenly, out of the blue, a handsome older woman turns up on their doorstep, claiming to be Hannah. No one is quite sure what to believe, but Jo, desperately wanting to rekindle the closeness she once had with Hannah and chafing against the coldness of her mother, invites the woman into her home to help care for Ruby—a mistake, we know, of catastrophic proportions. Macmillan (I Know You Know, 2018, etc.) strives to create a gothic atmosphere, but the setting falls short of true creepiness. Her decision to switch narrators does add layers to the story, but the voices all seem to tell more than they show, and no character is sympathetic enough, or charismatic enough, to really draw the reader into the mystery.
Art forgery! False identities! Adultery! Murder! But in the end, sadly, it’s more melodrama than true thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-287555-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won’t want to move until it’s over.
Suspense queen Ware's (The Woman in Cabin 10, 2016, etc.) third novel in three years introduces four women who have been carrying a terrible secret since their boarding school days, a secret that is about to be literally unearthed.
Isa Wilde, happy in her life as a new mother, receives a text one morning that simply reads, I need you, and hours later, she boards a train bound for the coastal village of Salten with her infant daughter in tow. She has come at her friend Kate’s summons, and soon they are joined by two other women who received the same text, Thea and Fatima. Fifteen years earlier, all four were best friends at Salten House, sneaking off campus on the weekends to spend time with Kate’s father, an art teacher, and her handsome, mysterious brother, Luc. Their school days ended in tragedy and scandal, however, and the four haven’t been back to Salten since they were expelled. Now, a bone has been found in the marshes, and Kate has called the others back in a panic. They know more about the body than they should, but even they don’t know the truth. Ware’s third outing is just as full of psychological suspense as her earlier books, but there is a quietness about this one, a slower unraveling of tension and fear, that elevates it above her others. Though there's still a fair dash of drama, it doesn’t veer into the realm of melodrama, developing consistently with the characters and with their personalities and pasts. Isa is a sympathetic narrative voice though her obsession with the concerns of new parenthood may put some readers off.
Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won’t want to move until it’s over.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5600-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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