Dear friends—
The publication of Hard Girls is just a week away! This is my first new novel since Subdivision three years ago, and the first in a literary thriller series that will continue with Buzz Kill, which I’m now putting the finishing touches on.
Here’s the description, from Mullholland Books:
Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her past: her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life.
When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.
Set in both the Pool family’s past and their present, and melding elements of a chase novel, an espionage thriller, and domestic suspense, Hard Girls is an utterly distinctive pastiche—propulsive, mysterious, cracked, intelligent, and unexpected at every turn.
In addition to all that, it’s about the disillution of two marriages, about guilt and shame and addiction, about parenthood, and whatever it is that makes a family a family—in case you were wondering if I’d abandoned my literary roots. If you liked Broken River or Familiar, this book might be for you. It’s inspired by some of my favorite crime series: Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad, Richard Stark’s Parker, Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, Lee Child’s Reacher, Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy.
I’ll be doing a book launch event next Wednesday, February 21, 7pm, at Ithaca’s Odyssey Bookstore, 115 West Green Street (next to the gas station, underneath the law office). If you’re in town, please come! I’ll give a reading, sign books, and answer questions about the series.
See you there!
Yours,
John