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Women

Review

The Lying Club

by Henrietta Thornton

The recent college-admissions scandal comes to mind when meeting the rich, competitive seniors of Colorado’s Falcon Academy High School and their even more fiercely cutthroat moms. Former friendships are thrown to the side when Mia and Sloane, best friends since grade school, both try for a soccer scholarship to UCLA. Their moms, who’ve spent countless hours together at soccer-pitch sidelines over the years, are increasingly at war too. It’s all eye-rolling entertainment for the staff at the school, who must please the moneyed families no matter how ridiculous their obsessions. Probably the most jaded by these mind games is Natalie, a secretary to the principal who has a front seat to the show and whose personal life is slowly being followed down the drain by her professional one. With so many dysfunctional characters and moral rollercoasters, readers won’t know whom to point at or root for when a body is found in the gym. Ward (Beautiful Bad, 2019) does a great job of portraying the disarray caused by meanness and greed, and when characters show unexpected sides, she deftly makes that switch. Note that there’s sexual abuse “off camera” here. For Liane Moriarty’s legions of followers.

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Review

The Lies I Tell

by Brian Kenney

Ingenious grifter. Con-artist extraordinaire. Feminist Robin Hood. Add to this just plain old brilliant and you have the incredible character of Meg Williams. When her mother gets conned out of the family home by a sleazeball boyfriend—then dies shortly afterwards—18-year-old Meg vows this will never happen to her, and she flips the narrative and figures out how to steal from men. She begins small—seducing a high-school principal—but slowly works her way up the food chain as she deftly separates men, one more despicable than the last, from their money. When enough of their assets are in her accounts, she suddenly disappears, off to another city, another persona, another man. While Meg thinks she’s getting away with it all, one woman, journalist Kat Roberts, is watching her. Kate has her own reasons to expose Meg, and the two of them dance around each other as Meg lays the groundwork for her biggest con yet, worth millions of dollars and putting a political career at risk. With two super-strong characters, a remarkably credible and terrifying depiction of high-level scamming, and a pace that’s relentless, Julie Clark has given fans of the domestic thriller a real treat.

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Review

Miss Aldridge Regrets

by Brian Kenney

We’re in 1936 London and Lena Aldridge has had her share of troubles. Alfie, her beloved father and only parent, has recently died. Alfie was a gifted musician, and Lena has followed in his footsteps, eking out a living as a nightclub singer. Until a gig in a worn down Soho nightclub, when her best friend’s husband, also the club owner, is poisoned and dies right in front of her. Time to get out of town! Fortuitously, Lena has been approached by a stranger, who claims to represent an old friend of Alfie’s, with a remarkable offer: come to New York and headline in a Broadway musical. With nothing to lose, days later Lena’s traveling first class on the Queen Mary. But she hasn’t left all her troubles behind. As a mixed-race woman (Alfie was African American, unknown Mom was white) who passes as white, Lena is anxious about her reception in the U.S., and when there’s another murder on the boat that’s all too similar to the nightclub homicide, her anxiety really ramps up. Hare does a wonderful job of depicting the era, including the big themes—like the rise of Nazism and the pervasiveness of institutionalized racism—as well as the small details, like Lena’s wardrobe. And in Lena, she has created a compelling and empathetic hero whom I would love to follow as she disembarks in NYC. Readers of female-led, historical mysteries from Rhys Bowen, Victoria Thompson, and Mariah Fredericks will be pleased to meet Lena Aldridge.

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Review

Dark Circles

by Brian Kenney

A foray into the wacky world of wellness led by my favorite character of the year, Olivia (Liv) Reed. Thirty-something Liv, an actor starring in a long-running TV series, is a bit down on her luck. The paparazzi caught her making out with a man who is not her boyfriend, and photos of her ensuing meltdown on the streets of Manhattan were published everywhere. Liv’s also a bit too hands-on with the booze and pills, and her relationship with her one friend, also her publicist/handler, is on the ropes. Begrudgingly, she agrees to check in to the House of Light—don’t call it rehab!—in upstate New York, which bills itself as a spiritual center. But before you can say namaste, the body of a young woman turns up in the adjoining lake—she had ties to House of Light—and when Liv learns she’s just the latest in a series of what are being called suicides, she’s off and running. Smartly, Liv uses her celebrityhood to start a podcast that becomes wildly successful and allows her to present the investigation in nearly real time. Comparisons to Nine Perfect Strangers, the Liane Moriarty book/Hulu series starring Nicole Kidman, are inevitable—and should be helpful in promoting this book—but Dark Circles is even better. After all, it’s got the sarcastic, sophisticated, completely credible, and even sometimes vulnerable voice of Liv Reed.

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Review

One of Us Is Dead

by Henrietta Thornton

Rose (The Perfect Marriage) brings to life the rich, overly botoxed women of Buckhead, GA. Mainly showpieces for their uber-wealthy husbands, they spend their passive-aggressive days at Glow, a membership-only beauty salon where the women commit to several treatments per week. Jenny, Glow’s owner, is stuck being nice to Olivia, the queen bitch of Buckhead, who has mastered the “kinsult,” or kind insult (“your skin is glowing…I can barely notice the lack of elasticity today”). Olivia’s abused minions include Shannon, the saddest woman in the book, whose politician ex-husband, Bryce, left her for a younger woman. The “girls,” and perhaps readers, want to hate Crystal, “Bryce’s midlife crisis,” but Rose doesn’t take the easy way out, creating in Crystal a more layered character than at first expected. Then there’s Karen, a luxury-real-estate lawyer who keeps the book and the “friends” as grounded as they can be. Chapters narrated by each of the women alternate with ones in which Jenny is being questioned by police about what exactly happened at Bryce and Crystal’s housewarming, an opulent event that featured a murder. Rose’s writing is pitch perfect when it comes to both keeping readers gripped and making them want to tear Olivia’s (beautifully done) hair out. If you enjoyed Clueless and other mean girls movies and books, this is for you.

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Review

The Woman in the Library

by Brian Kenney

Four strangers—two men, two women, all twenty-somethings—are sharing a table in the grand reading room of the Boston Public Library when a woman screams. They have no idea who she is, where she is, or why she screamed, but it does break down the barriers among the four, and by the time they leave the library, they are fast becoming friends. The crew includes a novelist; a law student; a psychology grad student; and our protagonist, Winifred, known as Freddie, a novelist who hails from Australia. It turns out a woman was murdered in the library, and the fab four take it upon themselves to investigate. But when one of the four is attacked, they begin to realize that there may be a connection between them and the murdered woman. And that one of them may be the murderer. Meanwhile, each chapter ends with correspondence to the author of The Woman in the Library, who lives in Australia, from a Boston-based friend who’s helping her with language and locale—until his communiques take a sinister turn. Readers who enjoy a playfulness in their fiction will be delighted by this book-within-a-book. For fans of Anthony Horowitz.

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Review

I’ll Be You

by Henrietta Thornton

The number of all-caps texts I sent about THE TWISTS IN THIS BOOK!!! were…many. Those twists concern the misdeeds of identical twin sisters Elli and Sam Logan, who are estranged because of a shocking betrayal. They’re former child TV stars, with Sam back then enthralled by their minor fame while Elli hated every moment. As adults, Elli is a mom while Sam sees reproduction as “a monetizable bodily function.” While Ellie explores empowerment in a self-help group, Sam is a barely sober alcoholic and drug addict whose possessions consist “primarily of emotional baggage.” The twins’ paths have diverged, but when their dysfunctional parents call Sam for help looking after a child–one she didn’t know her sister had–she drops everything. The first part of the book looks at the past and present from Sam’s perspective, and the second at the same events from the point of view of her sister. This reveals that identical events can be experienced through a gulf of misunderstanding, hurt, and fear and that damage and love will find ways out. Brown’s insightful language and the emotional brutality and fortitude shown as Elli and Sam are forced to see themselves and each other anew will stay with readers. If twins in fiction are of interest, also try Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half.

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Review

This Might Hurt

by Henrietta Thornton

The first crime here is psychological abuse of two sisters whose father, named only as Sir, is obsessed with building their resilience (“Lord knows you’re not going to get by on talent or gifts”). Sir’s isolated, scared little girls can’t go to bed at night unless they achieve enough points. Chores count, but they must also endure “tests” like sitting in the snow without a coat for an hour, holding their breath for two minutes, and kneeling on broken glass. The abuse leads the younger sister to become obsessed with Houdini and perfect a show based on his escapes, with the psychological underpinnings of that quest not lost on her or on readers. Fast forward to adulthood and there’s possibly a new crime afoot, or at least a mystery, as one sister, Natalie, visits a Maine island where she suspects her sister, Kit, is captive in a cult led by the reclusive, mysterious Teacher. The markers of a cult are glaring, but is Kit being held against her will and what’s behind the other residents’ willingness to obey? The solution is satisfying here, and getting to it will bring home to readers Teacher’s declaration of the book’s central truth: “The difference between a cocoon and a straitjacket [is] perspective.”

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Review

The Younger Wife

by Henrietta Thornton

Quirky meets romantic meets WTF in this Australian import that’s brimming with character. Two very different sisters are at the center of the maelstrom. Rachel is a beautiful and successful baker who spends a week perfecting tiny roses on a wedding cake but eats two tiers of it by the fistful hours before delivery. Her sister, Tully, married with two little boys, is consumed with anxiety and a compulsion to steal. The younger wife of the title is Heather, who’s marrying Rachel and Tully’s father, Stephen Aston, and whose big day opens the novel. Stephen’s ex-wife roaming the altar during the vows is bad enough, but when the couple moves to the sacristy, a scream is heard and the celebrant reappears in the church covered in blood. Hepworth (The Secrets of Midwives) then chronicles the leadup to this chaos, a saga that involves a hot water bottle stuffed with $100,000, romance with cake-pun-loving delivery man, and hilarious observations about the million ways we sabotage ourselves. The Astons also face their share of heartaches and worse (Alzheimer’s disease, rape, and domestic violence are part of the story). For fans of domestic suspense and of the Australian show Offspring, which also features loving sisters and their interesting choices.

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Review

The Shadow House

by Brian Kenney

If you arrived at your new house and found a package at the entrance, containing not some welcome brownies from a neighbor but a grotesquely mutilated bird, what would you do? If you’re anything like me, you’d head for the hills. But Alex, a single mother-of-two, is made from tougher stuff. Escaping from an abusive partner in Sydney, she’s trying out Pine Ridge, an ecovillage out in the boondocks. She’s committed to making it work, especially for her teenage son, who got up to some nasty behavior online. But the bird is only the beginning, as the creepiness includes more horrifying presents, vandalism, and surveillance. It turns out that Alex’s experiences aren’t all that different from those of another family six years ago, but unlike many a thriller protagonist, she’s no victim, and sets out to confront the evil before it destroys her and her family. This is a wonderfully written work of suspense that succeeds in being both completely terrifying and totally believable—no easy feat. For fans of Lisa Jewell and Ruth Ware.

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