If you’re ever tempted to enter into a “Strangers on a Train”-style pact with someone you just met, wherein you each drunkenly pledge to murder the other’s enemy — well, sober up and think again.
“This is a joke, right?” asks Amanda White, a bereaved mother in Steve Cavanagh’s twisty KILL FOR ME, KILL FOR YOU (Atria, 340 pp., $27.99), who is perturbed to hear that Wallace Crone, the man she hates most in the world, has been murdered. Crone’s killer: Naomi Cotton, to whom Amanda bared her soul a few days earlier and who is now turning the screws on Amanda to fulfill her side of this devil’s bargain.
“I’ve kept my promise,” Naomi says. “Now it’s your turn.”
In the Patricia Highsmith novel and the subsequent Hitchcock movie that introduced this intriguing plot to the public, the would-be victims are mere annoyances — a critical father, a faithless wife. Here they’re child killers and thus more objectively deserving of their potential fates. That’s only the first plot divergence in this full-of-surprises book, which also features several different kinds of criminal insanity.
Even as Amanda grapples with Naomi’s threats, a third character, unrelated to the first two, dreams up her own retribution fantasy. This is Ruth Gelman, a husk of her former self after a vicious intruder with icy blue eyes brutally attacked her at home in New York. All she wants is to see him dead. Is it possible that he is right there in the same restaurant as she is, calmly eating dinner at a nearby table? Pay attention — it takes some time to figure out who she is, and what diabolical role she will play in this drama.
Chris Bohjalian’s THE PRINCESS OF LAS VEGAS (Doubleday, 381 pp., $29) is populated by an unsavory band of characters. Chancers and gamblers rub shoulders with cryptocurrency speculators, organized-crime figures, celebrity impersonators and a moronic right-wing politician who, in a wily homage to Marjorie Taylor Greene, confuses the words “gazpacho” and “Gestapo.” But don’t let the seamy backdrop put you off. Bohjalian brings a propulsive vitality and a sly humor to a surprisingly moving tale.
The main character is Crissy, whose traumatic past has led her to a job as a Princess Diana impersonator at a down-on-its-heels casino called Buckingham Palace. All is not well there. Barely have its owners wafted into the story than both are dead, supposed suicides. It seems some bad people are hoping to buy the place.
Meanwhile, Crissy’s younger sister, Betsy, has recently moved to Las Vegas with her adopted teenage daughter, Marisa, and her red flag of a boyfriend, a flashy businessman named Frankie. He works for a dodgy company with a vague name and an imperfect relationship to legality. “Futurium is mostly above board,” he explains. In a dismaying move, he makes Betsy get a makeover so she looks more like her sister, and like Princess Diana.
The mayhem includes murder, cryptocurrency, bribery and blackmail. The bodies pile up. But underneath it lurks a poignant story of two sisters with a tragic shared history — and a clever teenager who knows her way around a computer and might well save the day.
When she was 17, Frances Adams had the misfortune of consulting a country-fair psychic. “Your future contains dry bones,” the woman intoned, part of an alarming message alluding obliquely to birds, queens and daughters, among other things. “All signs point to your murder.”
As Kristen Perrin’s puzzle-filled HOW TO SOLVE YOUR OWN MURDER (Dutton, 358 pp., $28) begins, decades later, the prophecy has finally come true: Frances, now an elderly widow, has indeed been murdered, her poisoned body found slumped in a heap in her living room in Castle Knoll, an English village. But don’t say she wasn’t prepared.
Before she died, she compiled dossiers on all her relatives and neighbors, festooned her walls with elaborate TV-style “murder boards” and left a will predicated on the assumption that someone would indeed get her in the end. It orders her two possible heirs — Annie Adams, her great-niece, and Saxon Gravesdown, her nephew by marriage — to compete to solve her murder. They have a week, or they forfeit the inheritance.
Annie recognizes that the answers might be found in the past — specifically in 1966, a year chronicled in the diary she finds in Frances’s study. It describes how the teenage Frances and her friends betrayed each other in a series of lurid events that ended, shockingly, in the disappearance of Frances’s bestie, Emily Sparrow (note the bird-related last name!), who has not been seen since.
Many of the same characters, and their children, still live in Castle Knoll and are still playing out ancient dramas. This is a low-stakes, non-terrifying mystery whose many puzzles fall in the sweet spot between risibly simple and prohibitively complicated. Castle Knoll’s unofficial name should be Nest of Vipers. As Saxon, a sneaky, spying child who has grown up to become the town’s coroner, puts it: “We’re all guilty of something.”
