LIARS IN PARADISE

The year 1925 finds Ginny Dugan, now co-owner with Jack Crawford of Shadow Investigations, under pressure to exonerate her partner from nine murder charges.

Sure, Jack’s had a colorful past. But despite the testimony of an eyewitness who’s conveniently vanished, Ginny can’t believe he shot up Manhattan’s Empire Club and stole a valuable sculpture. Jack’s old employer, mobbed-up Empire owner Dickie Stryker, magnanimously gives the duo five days to recover the statue and clear Jack. Their first order of business is to identify that witness as Lila Summers and track her down. That won’t be easy, because her trail leads to the heart of Echelon, the cultlike organization founded by charismatic success coach Roman Blackwell. Thanks to heiress Bella van Dorn, Echelon is now headquartered in her family manse in Glen Cove. Jack, who was Bella’s lover before she married Leo van Dorn, isn’t an obvious candidate to infiltrate Echelon, so Ginny volunteers to go undercover there. No matter how hard she searches for Lila, though, she keeps getting distracted by other women, from Lila’s seductive roommate, Margot, to Gloria Gardner, a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer. Everyone she finds at Echelon, from Blackwell on down, is deeply untrustworthy—and Ginny herself may be, too. But as Margot tells her: “You might be a real piece of work, Ginny Dugan, but you’re the best we’ve got.” The story unfolds less like a logical investigation than a fever dream whose layers get ever more opaque and more disturbing. Readers shouldn’t expect to have all Ginny’s questions, or all their own, answered.

Liars absolutely nails it. Paradise, not so much.