Leave your wife — and pay the price
PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS
THE BROKEN
by Tamar Cohen (Doubleday, £14.99, £13.49)
% COHEN has written a sustained work of near genius that takes a very familiar theme — man leaves wife for younger model — and not only brilliantly dissects the breakdown of a marriage but also the consequences for the couple’s close circle of friends.
When Dan Fisher leaves the emotionally fragile Sacha for the lovely Sienna, he thinks it’ll be a breeze if he behaves with affection and generosity towards his wife. And their great friends Josh and Hannah Hetherington believe they can remain neutral. Wrong on both counts.
Sacha goes into full hysterical breakdown mode and the relationship quickly becomes toxic, especially when their small daughter is used as a pawn.
Not only are the Hetheringtons sucked wholesale into the mess, but their own relationship is destabilised, particularly as they appear to be the target of a malicious campaign. Just who is manipulating whom?
Cohen’s first foray into psychological suspense is a triumph. AFTER I’M GONE
by Laura Lippman
(Faber, £12.99, % £11.49) AT THE heart of this story is a hole — left by the vanishing of Baltimore gambling tycoon Felix Brewer — and its consequences for the five women in his life: wife Bambi, three daughters, and a mistress.
‘Mine is a night-time business,’ Felix explained to his then sweetheart Bambi, and she accepted it gladly, along with the promised riches. But when the Feds catch up with Felix in 1976 and he engineers his own disappearance, she realises what it means to gamble.
However, life goes on for the Brewers, with its ups and downs. Bambi relishes her role in Baltimore Jewish society, and her daughters grow up — two gracefully and one disgracefully. But then Julie, Felix’s mistress, who had spoken of meeting up again with him, also disappears.
Flash forward to 2012, and her body is discovered in a nearby park. Can any of the Brewer women have had anything to do with it? They all have motive and Sandy Sanchez, an ex-cop working cold cases, is determined to find out.
As always, Lippman transcends the crime genre with this engaging novel, though you have to be on your toes to disentangle the various timelines throughout. HER
by Harriet Lane (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99, % £11.49) LANE’S much garlanded debut novel last year, Alys, Always, established her as an astute chronicler of middle-class life and what can go wrong when the demon envy rubs shoulders with careless privilege. Her is in similar vein — crackling with vitriol, menace and penetrating social observation.
The story is told from the perspective of two late-30s women who inhabit different worlds in the same corner of North London: Nina, an affluent artist who is controlled, sophisticated, cool and confident, and Emma, a harassed mother of young children, who is bored, needy and struggling with her vanished self-esteem and lack of money.
When the women meet, engineered by Nina, a friendship develops and Emma is gratefully drawn into Nina’s life. But, unremembered by Emma, the women have met before and Nina is plotting revenge, which is exacted in small, spiteful drips until the final denouement.