UNTIL MORNING COMES

A survivor of human trafficking tries to escape her old life.

At the heart of this novel by Epps is a young woman named Ava Rose Anderson who spent years in the clutches of charismatic figure and nefarious human trafficker Jeffrey Hoffman, the book’s Jeffrey Epstein–like villain. “Hoffman had held her captive for just over four years until she escaped that life at eighteen,” the narrative reads. “In the first few years of her escape, she’d had as much therapy as she could tolerate.” But the anxieties and dark thoughts of her time sealed in Hoffman’s “coterie of crass” still haunt her as the story opens, years later, when she’s living comfortably in Florida with her boyfriend, Caleb, in a quiet life that seems every bit as wholesome as her previous life was sordid. At one point, Ava’s friend Piper, who’d also been trafficked by Hoffman, joins Ava in reflecting on the life they’re both hoping they’ve left behind. “You just do it ‘cause it starts off fun and exciting,” she reflects. “And everyone is rich and offering you nice things and amazing places to go, and all you have to do for it is, is that.” Epps’ narrative shifts back and forth in time, at some points ranging to years past in order to show Hoffman at the peak of his power (and Ava in the depths of her misery) and, at other points, ranging to the present, when Hoffman is disgraced and dead but his former top lieutenant Maxime Bredwell is alive, at large, and generally unrepentant (“No one would have dreamed that she loved a good grift,” readers are told. “She’d laugh to herself in bored moments at how utterly naive people could be”). When Ava decides to find the elusive Maxine and confront her, the narrative takes off.

Epps writes this story as a fictionalized version of what might have happened if one of the young human trafficking victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his assistant, Ghislaine Maxwell, had been able to take matters into her own hands. The novel effectively depicts the world of Jeffrey Hoffman as well as the psychology of someone like Maxime Bredwell, who’s under close surveillance by an experienced retiree from the military. The decision to continually toggle the novel’s chronology to tell Ava’s and Hoffman’s overlapping stories is a risky one, and some of the dangers are obvious here. The shifts often feel more distracting than dramatically effective. Another gripe is the failure of Ava to ignite as a dramatic creation. Even when she’s upending her settled life and beginning to take major chances in her quest to right some wrongs, she seems fairly flat on the page. “Self-pity threatened to overwhelm her project,” readers are told in a typical characterization of Ava’s mental state. “Untethered and so completely unsettled, she doubted.” Epps has his eye on a larger revenge plot, but the novel’s action builds too slowly.

A topical but sometimes stodgy thriller about the hunt for a human trafficker.