Somebody's home

Rouda's (The Next Wife) tensely woven plot tackles family dysfunction and tough societal issues with nail-biting precision and frighteningly dark realism. The Dean and Jones families come from profoundly different stations in life but now are irrevocably linked through the house at 123 Cherry Hill Lane. Pastor Doug Dean, his wife Sandi, and their two young sons are vacating the house. Doug's 23-year-old son Tom has promised to leave the backyard carriage house several days after the new owners occupy the home. Julie Jones fled her billionaire husband Roger and their oceanfront mansion and purchased the Deans' charming but smaller home on the other side of town. She is hoping for a new beginning for herself and teenage daughter Jess. Behind a facade of normalcy, each family is hiding ugly secrets waiting to erupt. Within days, their lives will intersect and be forever changed. VERDICT Suspense and thriller readers will be on the edge of their seats for this novel that exposes the dark underbelly of human nature.--Mary Todd Chesnut

A woman's sudden decision to move into a house being sold by a minister and his wife exposes fault lines that undermine virtually every relationship in Orange County. After a teasing frame that shows an unnamed woman terrified by the realization that there's a man inside her home, the narrative rewinds two days to show the Rev. Doug Dean and his second wife, former Sunday school teacher Sandi, turning over the keys to their Oceanside home to Julie Cohen. Julie, an aesthetician and office manager who apparently had every cosmetic surgery imaginable before she was plucked from her job by big-time real estate developer Roger Jones, has secretly taken their 17-year-old daughter, Jess, and left him and his checkbook for good. Roger, not the type to take this kind of behavior lying down, schemes with an amusingly interchangeable roster of attorneys to cajole her into returning. Jess, a high school student who can't understand why her mother would undermine her seamless transition to USC, flirts with Tom Dean, a self-described incel who's refused to follow his father's orders and leave the carriage house on the property. The power dynamics are seriously complicated by a self-inflicted set of one-two punches: Jess is caught on viral video in a prominent position at a drunken party at which a round of beer pong turns into a queasy game of Nazis vs. Jews, and a pair of FBI agents arrest her father on a moral charge. If the circular firing squad that follows lacks the inevitability of the conflict in The Next Wife(2021), it allows more room for readers to wonder how things could possibly get worse. Whatever the opposite of family values is, Rouda seems intent on perfecting a genre that enshrines it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.