Under My Skin

July 30, 2018
Grief leads to self-destructive behavior in this searing psychological thriller from bestseller Unger (The Red Hunter). After Jack Lang is beaten to death while jogging in Manhattan’s Riverside Park early one morning, his widow, Poppy, has a nervous breakdown. A year later, Poppy is getting back to work at the couple’s boutique photography agency, but she still suffers from hallucinations and nightmares. She’s also haunted by a reoccurring vision of a man in a hood that could be related to Jack’s murder. She feels both comforted and suffocated by her mother and her best friend, Layla Van Santen, who worry because she continues to self-medicate with drugs and disappears for days, sometimes with strangers she meets online. Poppy’s search for Jack’s killer is the one thing that gives her focus. Though Poppy’s visions and flashbacks to the Langs’ life together occasionally become repetitious, the fully realized characters keep the plot from lagging. Readers will feel both empathy and sympathy for the driven Poppy. Agent: Amy Berkower, Writers House.

Starred review from August 1, 2018
A young woman struggling with the aftermath of her husband's murder finds herself in escalating danger in this novel of psychological suspense.Unger (The Red Hunter, 2017, etc.) is adept at thrillers that turn on clever uses of point of view. Her 16th book is a worthy entry in the currently crowded field of unreliable-narrator mysteries. New Yorker Poppy Lang was devastated when her husband, Jack, was beaten to death during a run in Riverside Park. The couple ran a photography agency together, and the murder of likable Jack seems to be a random crime. A year later, the case is cold and Poppy is a hot mess. She has a new apartment, a solicitous therapist, supportive employees, and maybe a new romance. A determined police detective is still trying to solve Jack's murder. The posh Central Park West apartment where her nurturing best friend, Layla, lives with her hedge fund manager husband and their kids is Poppy's haven. But she's haunted by her inability to recall what happened during her several days' disappearance just after Jack's death, by vivid nightmares that might be memories, by a figure in a hoodie who seems to be following her, and even on occasion by the apparition of Jack. Maybe it's grief, or PTSD, or the alarming amount of prescription drugs and wine she downs seeking "chemical slumber," but as her search for truth uncovers other crimes, she comes to doubt her judgment of almost everyone around her--and her own survival.Unger brings the reader along as her narrator's grip on reality is tested and keeps the twists coming in this standout thriller.

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Starred review from September 1, 2018
Grief is disabling Poppy Lang nearly a year after her husband, Jack, was murdered on a predawn run in Central Park. She's taking a toxic mix of pills and alcohol to help her sleep, then having dreams that morph into nightmares and hallucinations, and she believes that she's being stalked by a man in a hoodie. When an orchid with a mystifying message is found in her apartment, she contacts the detective still working on Jack's case as well as Layla Van Santen, her closest friend, who, with her husband, Mac, and teenagers Izzy and Slade, are those closest to her. Doubting that Jack's killing was a random act, Poppy searches for a motive, as she also tries desperately to remember the four days immediately after Jack's funeral when she disappeared, leaving family and friends frantic, before suffering a nervous breakdown. Headstrong, she ignores advice to be wary of the sculptor she met in a bar and to disregard hallucinations of Jack warning her to let the past go. As Unger builds suspense, blurring the lines between dreams and reality, she considers how well one person can ever know another, as secrets abound. Another fine psychological thriller from a master of the genre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)