Book Review

Jazz Bashara checks her bank balance every day like it might have grown on its own. She needs 416,922 slugs. Not four hundred thousand, not half a million. That precise figure. She will not tell anyone why, and the answer, when it finally arrives, is the best thing in the book.

A famous novelist orders his wife's dinner without asking. The first wife tells him never to do that again. The second wife thanks him for being thoughtful. Constantine builds an entire novel out of the gap between those two women, and the gap is where the danger lives.

Four people narrate this novel and every one of them is labelled: The Help, The Wife, The Star, The Friend. There is no chapter marked The Detective. Miss Marple is watched for four hundred pages and never once given the microphone, and that decision turns an authorised Christie continuation into something genuinely strange.

She will let him handcuff her. She will let him take her against a wall, in a barn, on a hayloft floor. She will not let him kiss her on the mouth, because kissing is the thing she misses most afterwards. That single rule is the smartest idea in Jessica Peterson's new cowboy romance.

A Silicon Valley family buys a Queen Anne they cannot quite afford. The house eats anything already dead, and then it eats the memory of it from everyone who is not on the deed. Doty's debut is a domestic horror novel about the one thing grief has never offered anybody: an opt-out.