Just Jennifer

In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware (Scout Press)

Leonora (Lee to those from her past, Nora now) is a borderline reclusive crime writer who is hiding from things in her past that she doesn’t want to remember or be reminded of.  She is very surprised when she is contacted to attend a hen party for someone from ten years ago, her best friend from high school; Nora is very wary about attending the party, a weekend in a remote part of England in the cottage that belongs to Clare’s new, possibly self-proclaimed BFF, Flo.  Nora reluctantly agrees to attend the party with her now closest friend, Nina, but things feel wrong from the start, especially after Nora learns that Clare is marrying James, Nora’s former boyfriend, the one who broke Nora’s heart and caused the rift between Clare and Nora.  Nora knows she should leave the remote cottage with no phone service and return to her quiet life, but before she can, the weekend takes a terrible turn and her past catches up with her and nearly destroys her present and future.  Nora is a very reserved, introspective character, but as the secrets she holds close are slowly revealed, a chain of events is set off that may cause her to lose everything.  Filled with quiet tension, this plot slowly sneaks up on you until there is no escape.

The Hand That Feeds You by A.J. Rich (Scribner)

Morgan Prager is finishing her thesis on victim psychology and has her apartment full with her new fiancé Bennett and several dogs Morgan has rescued.  She is horrified one day when she returns home to find Bennett dead, mauled to death, it appears, by her dogs.  As Morgan tries to grieve for her fiancé and reconcile that her dogs may have had something to do with his death, she tries to contact Bennett’s parents only to learn that he wasn’t who he said he was and doesn’t seem to exist.  As she digs further, she finds that everything he has told her was a lie and that he was lying to more than one woman making Morgan feel she is the stereotypical victim.  As she seeks out the truth about the man she thought she knew so well, she finds herself fighting not only for her dogs’ lives but for her own.  Written by two authors, the narrative shifts, sometimes a little uneasily, between the theory of sociopaths and victimology and the death of Bennett and Morgan’s love of rescue dogs.  Even with that, Morgan’s story is compelling, the mystery well-plotted and the rescue dogs’ fates handled humanly.