![]() For one thing, there are only four Ivies the fifth is missing. ![]() ![]() What will they wear? How will they decorate? “Think the most amazing, epic, terrifying Halloween decorations in the county,” one says.īut Theresa Pressley, who has just moved to Ivy Woods with her husband and teenage daughter, senses that all is not well. ![]() The Ivy Five, as the mothers call themselves, are in a state of frenzy. The book, a polished and entertaining homage to “Big Little Lies” and “Desperate Housewives,” begins seven weeks before Halloween. paper, $16.99), by the time this October’s party is over, “one of us will be dead.” (For some reason, it is the event of the year.) But according to an unnamed character in Tara Laskowski’s THE MOTHER NEXT DOOR (Graydon House, 340 pp. suburb, spend much of their autumn planning their Halloween block party. Vain, snobby, lording it over their inferiors, the queen-bee mothers of Ivy Woods Drive, an exclusive cul-de-sac in a D.C. But the surprises keep coming, and there’s something about Wren that makes us root for her. Wren’s present-tense narration, with its stream-of-consciousness anxiety, could have used some disciplined editing. Marrying these two stories - the story of Wren’s childhood with a crazy survivalist father, and the story of her ill-fated romance with the world’s creepiest cyber-expert - is a challenge Unger doesn’t always rise to. “All of them with troubled pasts.” Not only that, but not-Adam, it seems, had already known about the trauma in Wren’s own past. “He finds women on online dating apps,” the investigator says. Before too long, a private investigator turns up at Wren’s house looking for the woman from the prologue, who had also dated not-Adam and is now missing. It will be some time before she discovers the truth about Adam, who (we figure this out before she does) is not actually named Adam. “Something’s happened,” he texts before going silent. After three months of mind-blowing sex, however, she finds herself waiting alone in a restaurant, staring at the orchids on her table and wondering where her date is. “There are a lot of layers to all of us,” Wren observes. Sure, Adam Harper, the hunky cybersecurity executive whom Wren Greenwood meets on the Torch dating app, appears to be perfect - attentive, soulful, reliable, tall. ![]() The creepiest thing of all: when we discover the true meaning of the mysterious note.Įven without its ominous prologue, in which a young woman drives alone to a remote location in an untraceable car with an untraceable phone at the behest of a controlling boyfriend and (we’re pretty sure) is never heard from again, Lisa Unger’s LAST GIRL GHOSTED (Park Row, 394 pp., $27.99) sets up a five-alarm fire of a situation. Soon we are in a tale not just of profound misunderstanding but also of dynastic wealth and dysfunction, of how money and power can warp a community. He sends us hurtling down one path before yanking the reins and pulling us in another direction. Rickstad has an elaborate, old-fashioned style of narration. The reader will entertain many incorrect theories before arriving at the shocker of a finale.Īmong the many extant mysteries: Why did Wayland’s mother toss out all her husband’s belongings and never mention him again? Who was the menacing, sharp-faced stranger, dead leaves swirling at his feet, who threatened his father at his barbershop? (“Who do you love more?” his father asked Wayland after the stranger left. It’s both an intriguing message and a red herring. The note he left behind also serves as the title of this strange and engrossing novel, I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM (Blackstone, 229 pp., $25.99), the sixth by the reliably creepy Eric Rickstad. It was then that 8-year-old Wayland saw his father, the town’s “gentle, prim, fastidious” barber, shoot himself in the head. “If you remember me at all, you remember the shy, slight, discomfited and fatherless soul known to inhabit every little nothing town like ours,” Wayland Maynard, ex-resident of Shireburne, Vt., writes to his former neighbors in 2020, in a confessional manuscript describing events that took place more than 40 years earlier. ![]()
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