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IRRATIONAL FEARS

A hard-to-follow thriller with an intriguing mathcentric storyline.

After a woman witnesses the murder of her good friend, she travels to Switzerland to find his missing daughter in this debut thriller.

Mallory Lowe, a math professor at the University of Colorado, meets her old friend and graduate adviser, Tom Haley, at the top of Angel’s Landing in Utah’s Zion National Park. Mallory met Tom nearly 20 years ago while she was working on her doctorate in mathematics at the University of Oklahoma, and after Tom’s wife passed away, Mallory and his adopted daughter, Katie, grew close. Tom and Katie’s relationship has suffered since his wife’s death, however, and recently, she hasn’t been responding to his calls. “Something’s wrong, I just know it,” he tells Mallory. “It’s my fault….She’ll be killed if the dam is blown up.” But before she can ask more questions and make sense of Tom’s ramblings, a helicopter descends and a man with a rifle pushes Tom to his death. Mallory makes it her mission to find and protect the 28-year-old Katie, who was in Switzerland after a stint in the Peace Corps, and find out more about the dam that Tom mentioned. After arriving in Switzerland, she becomes acquainted with Möbius, a large, corrupt, multinational corporation invested in private water utilities that may have something to do with the aforementioned dam. Lindauer creates an engaging narrative that integrates mathematics. For example, when Mallory first climbs the mountain, she repeats to herself, “arc length…curvature…tangential angle…arc length”; later, a series of mathematical symbols may contain the key to the mystery. In one scene, when asked why math fascinates her, Mallory responds with a simple explanation: it’s “the language of the universe.” Unfortunately, however, the suspenseful moments lack enough context to bring them to life; the characters’ surroundings are rarely described in detail, leaving too much to the readers’ imaginations. In addition, the omniscient third-person narration sometimes jarringly switches to Mallory’s thoughts without attribution: “She caught herself. Was she all of a sudden letting her guard down?...They had her in their sights three times. Don’t be a fool.”

A hard-to-follow thriller with an intriguing mathcentric storyline.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 356

Publisher: Story Merchant Books

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2018

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

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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