‘The Perfect Wife’ has intriguing plot, chilling finale
‘Lost You’ a psychological thriller
By Oline H. Cogdill
(Ballantine Books) Some couples seem to be perfect for each other, but can any relationship achieve perfection?
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim Scott believes that his wife, Abbie Cullen-Scott, was the perfect wife, the perfect mother and that they had the perfect marriage. And that’s what he tells her. But this Abbie may look like his wife and possess her memories, but she isn’t human. She’s a “companion robot,” manufactured by Tim, founder of Scott Robotics based in San Francisco.
JP Delaney’s third psychological thriller, “The Perfect Wife,” puts – almost perfectly – a high-tech spin on the stories of Frankenstein and Pygmalion with a tinge of the Stepford wives. Delaney includes just enough technology while keeping the focus primarily on the characters.
Abbie wakes up in what seems to be a hospital, having a dream about when she and Scott became engaged. But as Scott explains, that wasn’t a dream but “an upload” and that she is a “cobot” with carefully curated “memories” that don’t include what happened to the real Abbie. But Scott gave this new Abbie an intelligence – no matter how artificial – and the ability to eventually render emotions. She’s stunned to learn that Abbie disappeared in a surfing accident five years earlier. Tim was accused of her murder but the charges were dismissed because of a lack of evidence. While Tim tries to keep the existence of this Abbie quiet, the news gets out, igniting unwanted publicity and relaunching a police investigation.
“The Perfect Wife” smoothly alternates between the new Abbie’s narrative and the couple’s past, showing how the uptight Tim fell in love with this freespirited artist. Abbie tells her story in second person, as if she’s not quite sure what she is, while their story as a couple is told by an unseen narrator.
Abbie is a compassionate character and is instantly appealing. It’s easy to forget that she’s a machine as she explores developing her emotions and feelings. At first, Tim seems like a good guy whose palpable grief led him to build a replacement. But Delaney’s subtle approach in depicting Tim’s controlling nature, his pathological obsession with work, and his neurosis about perfection add to the tension and the possibility of violence.
The intriguing plot leads to a chilling and surprising finale that perfectly caps “The Perfect Wife.”
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
“First Cosmic Velocity” is a cleverly conceived and beautifully delivered novel that looks at the struggle for space supremacy from the Soviet side of the Cold War.
As the US-USSR battle unfolds in the book, a tug of war also ensues between the Soviet cosmonauts brought to the program and the strict propaganda demands of their communist state. Two key figures picked to fly, Leonid and Nadya, embody this conflict, as deadly failures in Soviet rocketry put the lives of space pioneers in
danger.
Secrecy
Actually, there are two Leonids and two Nadyas. As imagined by Zach Powers in this debut novel, the degree of secrecy in the Soviet space program is so great that identical twins are chosen in their youth to become cosmonauts – and given the same name. That way, if one dies in space, the catastrophe can be concealed and the living twin can make appearances to receive public accolades as if nothing bad happened.
This fictional twist is brought off convincingly by Powers. He plays with actual Soviet foibles of the space era, including the USSR’s refusal to make public the name of the director of the country’s space program. As the Soviets did, Powers simply calls him the Chief Designer.
A humorous element appears when Premier Nikita Khrushchev – unaware of the use of twins – wants his little pet dog to be the first canine in orbit, a four-legged hero of the Soviet Union. There is no arguing with the premier, and a search for a lookalike dog ensues. But in the end, this is no laughing matter.
The space program drama is set in 1964, when the Americans and Soviets each had achieved various “firsts” in the race to claim territorial rights in the heavens and big political points on Earth. Instead of pride and uplift among the program’s key players, however, there is an overarching somberness to the narrative, an edge of anxiety over the prospect of lethal failures in the Soviet path to the stars.
Powers also describes the grim lives of the twins in their Ukrainian village in 1950, when poverty, desperate hunger and Stalinist-era brutality destroyed friends and families all around them.
The darkness and gravity of the narrative is mixed with stirring prose and dialogue that make “First Cosmic Velocity” a novel of ideas from the Cold War era.
(Crown) Surrogacy – in which a woman agrees to carry a baby for another person or couple – is a legal swamp in America, and in this, veteran crime novelist Stuart Neville, writing under the pen name Haylen Beck, has found the makings of an emotionally wrenching psychological thriller.
“Lost You” begins when Libby, recently abandoned by her husband, decides to take her toddler Ethan to a Florida resort to celebrate the start of her new life as a published author. But the good times turn bad when she turns her head for a moment. Ethan jumps on an elevator, the doors close, and he’s gone.
At first, she fears Ethan has been lost, but she soon realizes it’s worse – that Ethan has been found.
The bulk of the book consists of a flashback in which readers learn how Libby and Ethan arrived at this moment. The story involves a shady company that arranges surrogate births, a barren Libby whose history has left her with a dangerously obsessive need to raise a child, an impoverished young Anna who agrees to carry Libby’s husband’s baby for money and a snarl of state laws.
Neville, an Irish novelist whose previous work has made the bestseller lists of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, says he adopted the pen name Haylen Beck for this and a previous standalone thriller because he didn’t want to confuse fans who have come to expect his books to be part of his Belfast crime series.
“Lost You” toys with readers’ emotions, making them fearful for both Libby and Anna at times, fearful of both at times and uncertain until the very end about who – if anyone – is in the right. The story unravels at an anxietyinducing pace, and shocking twists appear around every corner.
(Flatiron Books) The tag line to Steve Cavanagh’s fourth novel about former con man turned defense lawyer Eddie Flynn is, on its own, tantalizing: “The serial killer isn’t on trial he’s on the jury.”
But Cavanagh’s “Thirteen” is no gimmick. It’s a superb actionpacked story that melds the legal thriller with the serial killer subgenre, featuring intriguing character studies of both heroes and villains and a perceptive look at the legal system.
Eddie sees a lot of similarities between his old life as a con man and his career as a lawyer, especially in dealing with juries. But the main difference is that Eddie is now scrupulously honest, willing to take on anyone, including corrupt cops. As a result, his practice is rather low-rent. His apartment is his office, and he advertises on the side of a hot-dog cart. He’s stunned when high-powered attorney Rudy Carp wants him to join the team defending up-and-coming actor Bobby Solomon, who’s accused of killing his wife, the popular actress Ariella Bloom, and Carl Tozer, the couple’s chief of security. The victims were found murdered in bed in the actors’ Manhattan home.
Although the evidence suggests that Bobby killed them in a jealous rage, Eddie believes his client may be innocent, while also recognizing that the young man is a gifted actor. But a brilliant defense may not be enough to get an acquittal. Joshua Kane, a serial killer, has targeted the trial and goes about dispatching would-be jurors until he gets to be an alternate – number 13 – though that doesn’t last long. Once actually on the jury, he will make sure to get a guilty verdict – by any means.
Irish author Cavanagh nails the New York vibe while illustrating an affinity for American legalese. Cavanagh delves deep to show how Kane manipulates the jury and how he has stayed under the radar of law enforcement for years. The number 13 becomes a chilling totem as Eddie begins to put together evidence and clues. “Thirteen” seamlessly alternates from the viewpoints of Eddie and Kane. Cavanagh shows how the highly intelligent Kane became a killer, yet the author never wants the reader to feel empathy or sympathy for him. Kane’s self-assuredness makes him forget the rule of never conning a con man.
Sharp dialogue, court scenes that crackle, well-devised red herrings and deeply sculpted characters make “Thirteen” an outstanding thriller. (AP)