I Need You to Read This
A Novel
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
This “super creepy” (The Washington Post) and “perfectly plotted whodunnit” (Katy Hays, New York Times bestselling author) follows an advice columnist searching for answers about her predecessor’s murder—from the bestselling author of The Golden Spoon.
Years ago, Alex Marks escaped to New York City for a fresh start. Now, aside from trips to her regular diner for coffee, she keeps to herself, gets her perfectly normal copywriting job done, and doesn’t date. Her quiet world is upended when her childhood hero, Francis Keen, is brutally murdered. Francis was the woman behind the famous advice column, Dear Constance, and her words helped Alex through some of her darkest times.
When Alex sees an advertisement searching for her replacement, she impulsively applies, never expecting to get the job. Against all odds, Alex is given the position but soon, she begins to receive strange, potentially threatening letters at the office. Francis’s murderer was never identified, turning everyone around her into a threat. Including her boss, editor-in-chief Howard Dimitri, who has a habit of staying late at the office and drinking too much.
As Alex is drawn into the details surrounding her predecessor’s murder, her own dark secrets begin to rise to the surface and she suddenly finds herself trapped in a dangerous game of cat and mouse that takes her all the way from the power centers of Manhattan to Francis Keen’s summer house, where her body was found and where the killer may just be waiting for her in this “fresh and fascinating” (Megan Collins, author of The Family Plot) page-turner.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A bored New Yorker gets her dream job—and a potential stalker—in Maxwell's entertaining if uneven follow-up to The Golden Spoon. Alex Marks spends dull days working as a pharmaceutical copywriter and reading the New York Herald's Dear Constance advice column. She's shaken when she learns Francis Keen, the longtime author of Dear Constance, has been murdered. One night, after a few too many glasses of wine, Alex decides to apply to be Francis's replacement. To her astonishment, she gets the job, allowing her to confirm what she's always suspected: that she's a great writer and a better advice dispenser. Soon, however, Alex picks up on a sinister undercurrent at the Herald involving bad blood between the editor and the owner, and starts receiving threatening letters that question her fitness for the job. Worried she might become the next target for Francis's killer, she enlists a former cop and a canny waitress at the diner she frequents to help her investigate. Meanwhile, a writer who goes by Lost Girl sends increasingly distressing letters to Dear Constance. Maxwell maintains scintillating tension throughout, but the overheated finale arrives a little too abruptly. It's a mixed bag.
