A Tip for the Hangman by Allison Epstein

What sticks with me, though, are the quiet moments, where the wounds of long-ago personal sacrifices have room to heal. When the strands coalesce - and that knitting is both obvious and heartfelt - the novel motors on at blinding speed, incorporating broken families, bottomless desire for revenge, and a denouement that makes the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre seem like mere trifle.

It takes a little while for Rio Youers to rev up the story, and the connections between present-day Brody and Molly and the titular, early 1990s-era Lola are too diffuse for the first third of the book. $27.99) reveals in short order, on a level of catastrophe that traps him and Molly in a level of grudge going back decades, long before either was born. But, he reasons, “there was sometimes a difference between what was right and what was necessary.” Too bad Brody’s decisions aren’t just desperate, but, as the dizzyingly plotted thriller LOLA ON FIRE (Morrow, 392 pp. Employing a clever narrative structure that flashes even further into the future to ratchet up the suspense, Langan maps the consequences of these battles and the viciousness that erupts between those who professed love for their friends and family with merciless precision.īrody Ellis knew he wasn’t doing the right thing, resorting to robbing convenience stores so that his younger sister, Molly, could continue medications to treat her disability. No wonder the sinkhole that opens up, which swallows a child and leaves other children to clean up the psychological messes of their parents, kindles tensions into an outright war. Set six years in the future (smartly sidestepping the need to reference anything pandemic-related), the book maps the lives, loves, dramas, prejudices and growing conflicts among the residents of Maple Street, all of whom moved to this parabola-shaped section of Sterling Park seeking betterment, conformity, upward mobility and - in the case of friends-turned-rivals Gertie Wilde and Rhea Schroeder - cover for past identities too ugly and traumatic to reckon with in their present mom selves.

Sarah Langan plumbs these literal and metaphorical depths as they rip apart a once-bucolic suburb in her disturbing and mordantly funny new novel, GOOD NEIGHBORS (Atria, 296 pp., $27), a departure and an extension of her early horror fiction. So random, so terrifying, they turn neighborhoods into “oozing wounds” - especially when grievances fester angrily underneath the surface.

A Tip for the Hangman by Allison Epstein