The Fever
By Megan Abbott. (Picador, $29.99.)
We’re looking at books for fans of Gone Girl, as we wait for the film version of Gillian Flynn’s spooky story to hit the cinemas. Megan Abbott is a good choice. Her writing is perhaps a little more lyrical than Flynn’s, but her tale is just as twisted, even more so perhaps when you start philosophising on the real meaning of The Fever. The teenaged girls of smalltown USA are being struck down by a mystery illness, is it black magic, is it hysteria, is it something even worse? There are family secrets, a lot of guilt and an undercurrent of sexuality - that is at times quite confronting - intertwined among the mystery. One that will keep you guessing to the last pages.
What Came Before
By Anna George. (Viking, $29.99.)
David and Elle have a relationship to rival that of Gone Girl’s Nick and Amy, in so many ways. In love, infatuated even. Then things go terribly, terribly wrong. Indeed here they start wrong, with David admitting to Elle’s murder. George then takes us back to the beginning of their relationship, the giddiness, the lust, the devotion and we watch it unravel, painfully, into emotional and physical abuse. This is a complex novel, full of complex characters. Its twists and turns make it hard to decide which side to take, much like Gone Girl. What this one has, however, is an essence of reality, which probably makes it scarier still.
The Good Girl
By Mary Kubica. (Harlequin Mira, $24.95.)
A one-night stand goes terribly wrong when Mia Dennett, inner-city art teacher and daughter of a prominent Chicago family, is abducted and hidden away in a secluded cabin out in the woods. This debut from Kubica had the potential to be run-of-the-mill but her characterisation and alternating voice lifted it well into the Gone Girl zone. Indeed, the characters here are probably more likeable than Flynn’s, although we did love to hate Nick and Amy, and the switching of time frame between past and present is also a clever device. There’s a neat twist I didn’t see coming. Highly recommended.
