You should have known A novel

Retired nurse Frannie Greene, the narrator of Keller's nicely observed if downbeat debut, reluctantly bows to her grown children's urging to move into Ridgewood, an assisted living facility in a Chicago suburb. She's slow to make friends until she meets Katherine Kearney, who's everything Frannie is not. When Frannie discovers that Katherine's husband, fellow Ridgewood resident Nathaniel, is the corrupt judge who freed the killer of her granddaughter, her unresolved grief turns into a desire for revenge. When Frannie spies an unattended medication cart, she uses her medical expertise to tamper with Nathaniel's medication. The next day, someone other than the judge is found dead. Suspicion eventually points toward a Ridgewood employee whom Frannie knows to be innocent. The remorseful Frannie strives to make things right--and in the process uncovers the real culprit. Some readers will be more engaged than others with the author's unsparing depiction of the myriad humiliations inflicted on the old by both institutional caregivers and well-meaning children, but the carefully crafted plot balances Keller's joyless depiction of old age. This isn't for those looking for a puzzling whodunit. (Apr.)

Old age, they say, is not for the faint of heart. Or, evidently, as Keller's first novel indicates, for moral innocents, either. Succumbing at last to the pleas of her son, Charlie, and her daughter Iris, widowed nurse Francine Greene agrees to put her Chicago-area condo up for sale and move to an apartment in the Ridgewood Assisted Living Center. She's slow to adjust to her new setting because she's been all alone since her husband died six years ago and she's not all that invested in being happy. But Ridgewood is well appointed, with helpful staffers, and eventually Frannie responds to the overtures of Katherine Kearney, whose air of entitlement seems a small price to pay for her friendship. That all changes when Frannie recognizes Katherine's husband, Nathaniel, as the judge who presided over the trial of Roger Stinson, the drunk driver who killed Iris' daughter Bethany four years ago--the judge who let him off with a slap on the wrist that Frannie is certain was bought and paid for by an offender who'd already escaped punishment for an earlier accident. Recoiling from the Kearneys, she becomes consumed with fantasies of revenge and, in a fateful moment, yields to their temptation. Keller, who's managed every step of Frannie's journey to this point with lacerating precision, shows the high cost of her whim but allows the tension to slowly drain out of her story's second half till Frannie's deeply anticlimactic confession: "I had to spend significant time and energy and worry and ingenuity cleaning up various messes I'd made." Assisted living facilities at their calmest can tap into some pretty deep fears. So this half a loaf may be better than one. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.