Easy to read, smoothly put together. A good airport book.
An angry ex-wife is stalking a young, innocent fiancee who is a carbon copy of her former self…or so it seems.
The use of a multiviewpoint, chronologically complex narrative to create suspense by purposely misleading the reader is a really, really popular device. Two words: Gone Girl. While we are not the fools we once were and now assume immediately that we are being played, the question is whether we still take pleasure in the twists and revelations that follow. Pekkanen (The Perfect Neighbors, 2016, etc.) and Hendricks’ debut collaboration falls into the first wife/second wife subgenre of this type of story (e.g., The Girl Before, The Last Mrs. Parrish). In all of these, an unbelievably handsome, wildly successful, secretive, rigid, orderly, and controlling husband—here it’s Richard, a 36-year-old hedge fund manager with “a runner’s wiry build and an easy smile that belied his intense navy-blue eyes”—marries the same type of woman more than once, sometimes more than twice. Of course, he’s not who he seems. Perhaps the female characters are not, either. Here, we meet Nellie, an adorable New York preschool teacher who is not quite sure she wants to give up the fun, shoestring, highly social lifestyle she shares with her roomie to move to a sterile suburb with Richard. But the wedding date—of course he hasn’t even told her the location, just “buy a new bikini”—draws ever closer. Something bad happened to Nellie in Florida a long time ago that has made her anxious and hypervigilant. Meanwhile, Vanessa, the spurned wife, lives with her artist Aunt Charlotte (a great character), is boozing heavily, and is about to lose her job at Saks. She’s stalking Nellie, determined to prevent the marriage at all costs. Since you know there’s got to be more to it than this, the fun is in trying to figure it out before they tell you. We didn’t! One of the subplots, the one about the bad thing in Florida, was fresher than the main plot—maybe Hendricks and Pekkanen should have written a whole book about that.
Easy to read, smoothly put together. A good airport book.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13092-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Surviving a crime is the beginning of the story, not the end, in this astute, engrossing thriller.
This complex psychological thriller digs deep into the layers of trauma that linger long after a terrible crime.
This is the 17th novel by Unger (Under My Skin, 2018, etc.), and it revisits one of her frequent themes: the indelible impact of violence on the survivors of crimes. The survivor at its center is Rain Winter, who at age 12 was one of three friends who became the victims of a monster. At first glance, Rain seems to have overcome that nightmare. She’s happily married and reveling in motherhood, although she vacillates between the joy she finds in 1-year-old Lily and the tug of the job she left as a hard-charging radio news producer. That tug increases when she hears that a man whose murder trial she covered, a man who was acquitted of killing his pregnant wife, has been found dead—killed in just the same way his wife was. Rain was sure he was guilty, so she feels some dark satisfaction, and her investigative instincts (and maybe something else) are aroused when a dark web mole, tipster, and blogger tells her off the record that there have been other, very similar revenge murders, and they might be the work of the same person. That wakes her own worst memories: “There weren’t many people who remembered Rain’s ugly history. It was big news once, but it had faded in the bubbling morass of horrific crimes since then.” Its aftermath included the children’s attacker being released from prison—and murdered. Chapters describing Rain’s pursuit of the story of a possible vengeful serial killer are intercut with chapters narrated by a mysterious person from her past, one who is closer to her in the present than she knows. Unger skillfully peels back the layers of Rain’s emotional scar tissue to expose the truth of what happened in her childhood and the fear, rage, and guilt it left behind, with a series of shocking consequences.
Surviving a crime is the beginning of the story, not the end, in this astute, engrossing thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0872-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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