J. Robert Lennon. Hard Girls: A Jane and Lila Pool Thriller

Lennon, who has always played with a range of genres in his literary fiction (Broken River, Familiar, Mailman) now dips his pen into more commercial waters with the same inventive, adventurous flair. His new thriller, first in a series, revolves around twins (fraternal, not identical) Jane and Lila Pool. Thirty-five-year-old Jane leads a quiet suburban life in upstate New York, working in a dead-end administrative job at the local college, checking on her absent-minded professor father, and trying to parent adolescent Chloe despite the obnoxious interference of her disapproving mother-in-law. But her comfortable, if boring and unsatisfying, existence is turned upside down when she receives an encrypted email in the guise of spam from her long-estranged sibling. Lila has found their mother, who abandoned the girls 20 years ago, and she wants Jane to come with her to track and confront the wayward Anabel, who may or may not be a CIA agent-turned-drug-queen-pin. As the sisters embark on a whirlwind journey that eventually takes them down to Central America, alternating chapters recount the twins’ lonely, isolated childhood and teenage years as they spy on their distant and remote mother, savoring the few moments of kindness she shows them (“the marvelous, elusive feeling of their mother’s attention”), until Anabel’s final disappearance and an unexpected act of violence propel the girls on a traumatic road trip of escalating bad decisions. Along the way, readers discover who the true hard girl is. Mixing elements of a chase novel with an espionage thriller, this is also a touching story of sisterhood and motherhood in all their complications. Despite a muddled climax, Lennon’s well-written mashup of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Thelma and Louise, but with a happier ending, will appeal to his fans and attract new readers.