The Hand That Feeds You
A Novel
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3.7 • 16 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“An unnerving, elegant page-turner” (Vanity Fair) of psychological suspense about a woman in an intense sexual relationship with a man who turns out to be a predator—by celebrated writers Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment writing as A.J. Rich.
Morgan, thirty, is completing her thesis on victim psychology and newly engaged to Bennett, a man more possessive than those she has dated in the past, but also more chivalrous—and the sex is hot. She returns from class one day to find Bennett brutally mauled to death, and her beloved dogs covered in blood.
When Morgan tries to locate Bennett’s parents to tell them about their son’s hideous death, she discovers that everything he has told her—where he was born, where he lives in Montreal, where he works—was a lie. He is not the man he said he was, and he had several fiancées, all believing the same promises he gave Morgan. And then, one by one, these other women are murdered. Morgan’s research into Bennett has taken on new urgency: in order to stay alive, she must find out how an intelligent woman like herself, who studies predators, becomes a victim.
For readers of Girl on a Train and Luckiest Girl Alive, this “twisty, unsettling thriller” (The New York Times) is an “irresistible” (Vogue) collaboration between two outstanding writers. “The Hand That Feeds You goes from zero to terrifying in about five pages…Once this thriller gets its teeth into you, it doesn’t let go” (The Tampa Bay Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writing under the pseudonym A.J. Rich, Amy Hempel (Reasons to Live) and Jill Ciment (Heroic Measures) team up in this toothless mystery about murderous dogs and a "victimologist turned victim." Morgan is a master's student in forensic psychology studying how victims are chosen by their attackers. She is engaged to a man named Bennett, whom she met while conducting an online experiment about sexual predators a red flag if there ever was one. One day Morgan returns to her Williamsburg apartment to find Bennett fatally mauled, presumably by her three beloved rescue dogs, two pit-bull mutts and a Great Pyrenees. From this taut, eerie opening, the tale gradually loses its fierceness. Morgan begins to doubt whether her blood-covered hounds could be capable of such aggression, and her suspicions only increase when she discovers that Bennett was keeping some rather significant secrets. In search of answers about her lover's hidden life and gruesome death, she also tries to prevent her dogs from being put down, which slows her investigation and any narrative momentum. With its focus on sociopathy and overt references to Cholderlos de Laclos's masterpiece of erotic manipulation, Dangerous Liaisons, the novel has the makings of a penetrating psychological thriller. Unfortunately, neither the perpetually blindsided heroine nor the paper-thin villain has the depth to redeem this perfunctory, and outlandish, mystery.
