The Girlfriend
A Novel
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The perfect brother. The perfect boyfriend. The perfect lie.
Mags doesn’t believe her brother’s fall was an accident. In that forty-foot stairwell, he didn’t just slip over the edge.
But there is only one witness, Jody, the girlfriend grieving at his bedside.
Which is another story Mags doesn’t believe.
Because Jody likes telling stories, and this may be her most twisted one yet.
As Mags begins to unearth the secrets hidden in her brother’s wake, she finds she isn’t just looking for the truth. For Mags, this is more than a simple tragedy. This is an opportunity for revenge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stirring but unwieldy novel, Naughton (Tattletale) introduces two women intent on avoiding and covering up traumatic moments from their pasts. Mags takes time off from her corporate job in Las Vegas to visit her long-estranged brother, Abe, in London. When she arrives, she learns that Abe is in a coma after a fall down stairs. Immediately, she begins to suspect that the fall was not suicidal (as the police believe) but that his girlfriend, Jody, may be to blame. Naughton alternates chapters between Jody, Mags, and Mira, a neighbor of Abe's. While readers will delight in Mags's nuanced struggle with her emotions regarding her brother and her suspicions of Jody, many sections are clich d, such as those from the perspective of Mira, who knows more than she's saying. Sections told in third person are scattered throughout the book, amplifying the cat-and-mouse feel of Mags' investigations and muddying the water of what really happened by creating an undercurrent of unreliability. Although the investigation into Abe's fall drives the narrative, the nature of Mags and Abe's past falling-out is a subject of intrigue. Naughton's narrative asks intriguing questions about overcoming past traumas and the desire for revenge, but the twists that come with the answers never quite satisfy.
