The debut novel of an astonishing voice in psychological suspense. As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours. Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past. Richly atmospheric, stunning in its complexity, and utterly convincing and surprising to the end.
Kit Owens harbored only modest ambitions for herself when the mysterious Diane Fleming appeared in her high school chemistry class. But Diane's academic brilliance lit a fire in Kit, and the two developed an unlikely friendship... until Diane shared a secret that changed everything between them. More than a decade later, Kit thinks she's put Diane behind her forever, and she's begun to fulfill the scientific dreams Diane awakened in her. But the past comes roaring back when she discovers that Diane is her competition for a position both women covet: taking part in groundbreaking new research led by their idol. Soon enough, the two former friends find themselves locked in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse that threatens to destroy them.
Molloy's fiction debut features the May Mothers, a mommy group made up of Brooklynites who gave birth in the same month. One mother, Winnie, seems to always be on the outskirts of the group. She's quite reserved, so the more gregarious mothers have to push her to join them in a Mom's Night Out at a local bar. She frets momentarily over leaving her three-month-old son, Midas, but aggressive Nell sets her up with a new babysitter, so Winnie decides it will be fine to let her hair down for one night. When Midas is kidnapped the babysitter fell asleep all hell breaks loose, and every mama is under suspicion. As the investigation gets underway, it seems that every member of the group has some pretty big secrets to hide. Why did Nell delete the video-monitor app from Winnie's phone earlier that night? Who is the token male (literally nicknamed Token) in the mommy group? Readers who can't get enough of suburban suspense along the lines of Liane Moriarty and B. A. Paris will want to give this a try.-
Caryl Phillips' latest novel, based on the troubled life of the writer Jean Rhys, is a lush exploration of the costs of colonialism, the limited possibilities for non-conformist women, and egregious power imbalances between genders and races. Rhys' life — she was born in the British colony of Dominica in 1890 and sent to school in England at 16 — is a fitting canvas for Phillips' perennial themes of displacement, alienation and muddled identity.
It's easy to understand why Phillips — who was born in St. Kitts, grew up in Leeds, studied at Oxford, teaches at Yale, and lives in New York — is drawn to Rhys, an intriguingly complex, self-destructive individual who spent most of her life in England but felt at home nowhere. A View of the Empire at Sunset is not the first evidence of Rhys' impact on Phillips: His last novel, The Lost Child, painted a nightmarish early childhood for Heathcliff as part of a haunting take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights — much as Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, her extraordinary response to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, imagined a powerful back-story for Rochester's first wife, the madwoman in the attic.
Phillips' view of the empire at sunset is not a pretty one. Social and racial stratifications and resentments cloud the atmosphere. It's no meteorological accident that it is always raining in this novel — and that his characters are rarely equipped with umbrellas. His depiction of chilly, damp England is bleaker and less sympathetic than his view of Rhys; Gwen announces harshly to her second husband, an Englishman, during one of their many quarrels, "Unlike you I have no faith in the civilizing power of the English."
Rhys' travails are painful and increasingly exacerbated by her bad behavior. She's derided for her accent in drama school, trudges through cheap seaside towns as a traveling chorus girl, and is repeatedly forsaken by the wealthy lovers who pay her rent until she becomes too difficult. Her marriages bring scarcely more comfort.
Yet there's beauty aplenty in Phillips' supple, often sensuous prose. Views from train windows of mist-shrouded farmland provide a pronounced contrast with the humid, blazing heat of Dominica, yet both express far more than climate. One example: Phillips' heroine, on her first morning back in Dominica, perches on a rocky outcrop above the harbor, "where she intended to station herself so that, in an hour or two, as the listless waves continued to lap, she might witness the full glory of the sun rising over her now empty world."
