by Karen White ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017
An atmospheric and entertaining look at the friends who keep your secrets—and the friends who keep you guessing until it's...
Secrets, scandals, and SUVs follow a single mother in White’s (The Guests on South Battery, 2017, etc.) latest Southern mystery.
After her husband has an affair, Merilee Talbot Dunlap moves her 10-year-old daughter, Lily, and her 8-year-old son, Colin, to a charming cottage behind a farmhouse in Sweet Apple, Georgia, for a fresh start. Her new landlady, Sugar Prescott, is “two years older than dirt and just as mean”—at least according to Heather Blackford, the class mother at Lily’s new school. (But it’s hard to trust the judgment of a woman who puts $20 Sephora gift cards in the goodie bags she buys for the kids' first day of school.) Merilee struggles to fit in with Heather and the other housewives of Sweet Apple, whose gleaming smiles are more menacing than friendly—but whose friendship is irresistible. Merilee and Sugar form a surprising bond, telling their stories in alternating chapters, while the anonymous author of a local gossip blog fills in the rest of the details with wicked precision. The generational differences between Merilee and Sugar, from parenting styles to use of technology, lend tension even where camaraderie abounds. When a body turns up in Sweet Apple, it brings with it the memory of Merilee’s brother, David, whose death hovers over her like a dark cloud (along with another secret that Merilee thought she had buried for good), making Merilee a target for the blame and scorn of her neighbors. The surprise is not in learning that Merilee’s perfect new friends are not as perfect as they pretend to be but in the way that grief and guilt are passed around like a rejected potluck dish in the wake of a terrible tragedy.
An atmospheric and entertaining look at the friends who keep your secrets—and the friends who keep you guessing until it's too late.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-48838-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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