Starred review from March 6, 2023
In this spine-tingling suspense yarn from Edgar Award winner Abbott (The Turnout), pregnant second grade teacher Jacy learns there’s plenty she still doesn’t know about her taciturn artist husband Jed or the family he rarely mentions—maybe a dangerous amount. The action unfolds during the couple’s summer road trip from New York City to visit Jed’s father, a retired physician, at his cottage on Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. At first, Jacy feels transported by the surroundings and her father-in-law’s near-courtly solicitousness. (His brusque caretaker, Mrs. Brandt, is a different story.) But things shift when Jacy has a miscarriage scare and, in the aftermath, Jed aligns with his father’s alarmingly old-school notions about women and pregnancy. Rightly or wrongly, Jacy starts to feel like a prisoner. Manipulating the sense of menace like a virtuoso violinist, Abbott expertly foreshadows the wrenching family secrets that are exposed in a ferocious finale. Sinewy prose and note-perfect pacing make this a masterful and provocative deep dive into desire, love, and gender politics. Readers will be left breathless. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House.
April 1, 2023
An expecting couple's whirlwind summer trip to reconnect with family unravels into something like a game of cat and mouse. It's no spoiler to say that Jed and Jacy's trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to visit Jed's father, Dr. Ash, doesn't go as expected. Jacy, as first-person narrator, is not afraid to drop hints that all is not well in Jed's childhood home despite the happy reason for the trip--celebrating the newlyweds' pregnancy news. After a lucid dream in a roadside motel, Jacy suggests "we could go back and just explain it wasn't a good time. Not with the baby coming." How different things could have been. Instead, the couple pushes on, their nervous excitement brimming. "It was tempting fate, though, wasn't it? I see that now," says Jacy, a couple days into the visit and growing more aware. Dr. Ash shows a touching interest in Jacy's well-being, an eye always on her belly. It's only natural that Jed's mother would come up. She died in childbirth, Dr. Ash reveals. "Had Jed told me this and I'd missed it?" Jacy wonders. This is the first crack in the family facade, a chip in the paint that reveals layers of history underneath. The voice of Jacy's own mother rings in her head--"Honey...we all marry strangers." Lurking in the background is Mrs. Brandt, the Ash household's longtime caretaker. Her formal nature suggests a strong loyalty to Jed's family. "It's hard enough seeing you," Mrs. Brandt says. "Pregnant, fulsome. Fecund, ripening." This ability to twist a good thing inside out until it feels shameful is classic Abbott. Jacy's belly is suddenly a trigger, the inevitability of birth like a bomb waiting to go off. Unease turns to discomfort turns to fear when Jacy wakes up bleeding one morning, and suddenly her body no longer feels like her own. Jacy wants to leave, but Dr. Ash wants her to do what's best for the baby. Who gets to decide? And what about Jed? Compared to Jacy, Jed reads like a ghost of a person, flat on the page. But maybe that's the point given this is Jacy's story to tell. Abbott masterfully uses the pretext of a pregnant woman's heightened senses--"I could smell everything now...even the carpet glue, the wood paste in the staircase post"--to build a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity reminiscent of Get Out. You're sure to get chills. An unsettling, nightmare-inducing morsel from a master of suspense.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from April 15, 2023
The author of You Will Know Me (2016), Give Me Your Hand (2018), The Turnout (2021), and many more outstanding crime novels delivers another knockout performance with her new thriller. New Yorkers Jacy and her husband, Jed, are happily anticipating the birth of their first child. A visit to Jed's father in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula feels a little stressful, but Jacy likes the man, a doctor, so she's not overly concerned. An unexpected bacterial infection adds a complication to the visit, but Jacy is sure it's nothing some antibiotics can't clear up. Then something changes in the small cottage--something seemingly insubstantial yet somehow claustrophobically threatening. A housekeeper who seemed a little standoffish now seems menacing. Jed's mother, dead for years and barely mentioned, becomes almost like an actual presence in the cottage. A sense of foreboding falls over the story, a feeling of something evil lurking just out of sight. Is Jacy simply imagining things, or are she and the baby inside her in real trouble? Abbott is an accomplished storyteller (she's won or been nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar and the Anthony), and this is one of her most compelling and well-constructed novels. A real treat for the author's many fans and for everyone who treasures that sense of Gothic-tinged trouble both within and without. Think Rebecca in the UP.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Abbott was once a cult favorite, but those times are long gone. She's a crime-fiction A-lister now.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.