Invisible Girl

August 1, 2020
The disappearance of a teenage girl disrupts the lives of her former therapist, his family, and a lonely neighbor. Seventeen-year-old Saffyre Maddox has been in therapy with Roan Fours, a child psychologist, for three years for self-harming after the deaths of her parents. When Roan suggests Saffyre is ready to move on, she feels betrayed and begins following Roan and spying on his wife, Cate, and two teenage children. She learns Roan is having an affair but also that multiple sexual assaults are taking place in his neighborhood. When Saffyre disappears after her blood is found by the apartments across the street from Roan's house, Owen Pick, one of Roan and Cate's neighbors, is arrested and jailed based on his history of visiting incel websites after having been placed on leave from his job following sexual misconduct complaints. At the same time, Cate becomes suspicious of Roan's lies and where their son, Josh, is sneaking out to. Jewell's latest domestic thriller features an array of characters set in a posh London neighborhood but struggles to create any real tension regarding Saffyre's disappearance. The themes of sexual assault and incel culture are only marginally developed despite the key part each plays in the story. As such, even with these subjects, Jewell's latest is not nearly as dark as her earlier novels. This might be a welcome change if the characters had emotional depth or unique narrative voices, but they too are only superficially realized. A lackluster and underdeveloped story.

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August 10, 2020
Facile plotting, underdeveloped characters, and unconvincing stakes mar this disappointing domestic thriller from bestseller Jewell (The Family Upstairs). Owen Pick, a 33-year-old computer science teacher, gets suspended from his London college when female students allege sexism in the classroom and misconduct at a Christmas party. While awaiting the results of the school’s investigation, Owen—a virgin who lives with his aunt—begins frequenting rage-filled “incel” web forums. Across the street, 52-year-old Cate Fours—a stay-at-home mom to two teenagers—grows suspicious of Owen after a masked man starts assaulting local women. Meanwhile, troubled 17-year-old Saffyre Maddox, whom Cate’s husband, child psychologist Roan, recently discharged from treatment for self-harm, decides to follow Roan, because, after three years of therapy, she misses his stabilizing presence. To Saffyre’s regret, her surveillance reveals that Roan isn’t the upstanding man she believed him to be. Though Jewell neatly entwines her protagonists’ story lines, a too-pat conclusion fails to gratify. Fans will hope for a future return to form. Agent: Deborah Schneider, ICM Partners/Gelfman Schneider Literary.

September 11, 2020

The first mystery Banville has written under his own name, rather than as Benjamin Black, Snow stars a crusty Protestant detective investigating a murder in County Wexford, buried in endless Snow. In Carlyle's debut, The Girl in the Mirror, jealous Iris takes over the identity--and the handsome husband--of golden-girl twin sister Summer, who mysteriously disappears from a yacht in the middle of the Indian Ocean (100,000-copy first printing). In House of Correction, French's new stand-alone, back-in-town Tabitha is arrested for murder when a dead body is found in her shed, and given her pill-popping history of depression and faded recollections of the day, she starts wondering if she really is guilty (50,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Jewell's Invisible Girl, virginal 30-year-old geography teacher Owen Pick is suspended from his job for sexual misconduct he denies, ends up on a shady online involuntary celibate forum, and eventually is a suspect in a teenager's disappearance (250,000-copy first printing). Molloy follows up her New York Times best-selling The Perfect Mother with Goodnight Beautiful, about newlyweds Sam Statler and Annie Potter, who have moved to his quiet upstate New York hometown as he pursues his career as a therapist, though, dangerously, his sessions are heard by neighbors through a ceiling vent (100,000-copy first printing). A Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner and finalist for multitudinous awards, Neville collects short crime, horror, and speculative fiction (some new to print) in The Traveller and Other Stories, a cogent example of Northern Irish noir. With Death and the Maiden, Norman wraps up mother Ariana Franklin's 1100s England-set series about Adelia Aguilar, Mistress of the Art of Death, with an original story about Adelia's daughter, Allie, investigating when several girls go missing from a village she is visiting (40,000-copy first printing). The protean Oates offers four masterly, never-before-published novellas, exemplified by the titular story in Cardiff by the Sea, whose protagonist rediscovers past tragedy when she inherits a house in Maine from someone she doesn't know. In Patterson/Serafin's Three Women Disappear, a mob accountant who is the nephew of the don of central Florida is fatally stabbed in his own kitchen, and which of three women--his wife, his maid, or his personal chef--might be responsible (500,000-copy first printing)? Rankin's A Song for Dark Times witnesses the returns of Inspector Rebus (50,000-copy first printing). In The Devil and the Dark Water, Turton's follow-up to the top LibraryReads pick, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, famed detective Samuel Pipps is sailing back to Amsterdam in chains when terrifying events assault the crew, Pipps's sidekick vanishes, and Pipps himself is asked to puzzle out what's happening.

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