The woman who lied A novel

Best-selling author Douglas (The Girls Who Disappeared, 2023) delves into familiar territory with this thriller demonstrating how fictional works can be weaponized to instigate and glamorize real violence. Emilia Ward hopes that her current book will bring a definitive conclusion to her long-running Detective Moody series. On the cusp of its submission, she becomes the target of unnerving pranks that reference plotlines extracted from her books. Ward soon realizes that her fictional serial killer might have become the inspiration for a real-life murderer, with herself cast as his final victim. Since some re-enactments are drawn from her unpublished manuscript, the author is forced to suspect her closest family and friends. Douglas spins a fast-paced, multi-layered, and unpredictable tale, with plenty of intensifying cliffhangers. A dedicated reader will have to wrangle the many characters, red herrings, and embedded narration that obfuscate the real and the imagined. By reinvigorating a derivative premise with clever reveals and believable feints, Douglas showcases her trademark skills at misdirection. This will draw fans of the "artist beset by their creation" conceit and admirers of authors like Alice Feeney and A.J. Finn.

A novelist is beset by small harassments inspired by her books--and then the attention starts to escalate. Emilia Ward, author of the successful DI Miranda Moody series, has decided to kill off her beloved main character after 10 years, even though Miranda has brought her success and fame. As she works on the final drafts of Her Last Chapter, delving into the dark world of a serial killer, she begins to find small gifts and offerings on her doorstep--a broken seagull figurine, a funeral wreath--that point to certain plot elements in the earlier Moody books. The police, of course, find little they can do, but Emilia feels more and more as if she's not only being targeted, but also followed. Louise, a friend who's on the force, is not directly involved in the investigation, but when Emilia's teenage daughter, Jasmine, goes missing, Louise is immediately on the scene. Jasmine is found without incident, but the scenario clues in Emilia to a chilling truth: Only the people nearest and dearest to her could have orchestrated it, as it's a plot point in her as-yet-unpublished novel. Could it be her ex-husband, now married to her ex-friend? Or her current father-in-law, himself a former cop? Or even Louise, who's been acting strangely? As the sense of threat escalates, Emilia must confront a shameful secret as she tries her own hand at investigation. The novel mostly centers on Emilia, though there are occasionally chapters from the point of view of a female detective investigating a serial killer, and chapters concerning a girl named Daisy whose mother seems to have been murdered by this same killer. Will all the stories overlap? Yes, of course. There are an awful lot of characters and names to keep straight, but overall, the book is well constructed and paced. Thoughtful, twisty, and tense. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.