It’s a fascinating reminder that no story is complete unless you hear it from everyone involved. There’s William, a sadistic and amoral film producer Brian, who was fired under murky circumstances from his job as a teacher in France and Luke, a rock star whose fame and success haven’t liberated him from his childhood demons or from his status as the family’s designated victim.Įach brother narrates the book in turn, so that scenes partly described by one are rounded out by second and third perspectives later. The book starts with the three brothers at a funeral - two in the pews, one in a coffin - but we won’t know until later who has died, and who did it. (Don’t get me started on the sins of their mother, the ghastly Melissa.) One of the delights, if that is the right word, of this book is how thoroughly the author delves into the details of the family’s world-class dysfunction. The cruelties the three Drumm brothers inflict on one another in the Irish writer Liz Nugent’s LITTLE CRUELTIES (Scout Press/Gallery, 352 pp., $28) include lying, bullying, stealing, seducing one another’s girlfriends and, finally, murder.
(She used the money to help finance and operate her champion quarter horse-breeding operation.) Crundwell seemed to show no remorse the fictional Becky is playing a more morally complex game. The story was inspired by the bizarre case of Rita Crundwell, comptroller of Dixon, Ill., who in 2013 was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison for embezzling more than $53 million in town funds in possibly the greatest municipal fraud in American history. Tedrowe lays all this out - the quick shifts from one persona to another, the financial shenanigans, the increasing danger of the high-wire act Becky has set for herself, her growing ruthlessness - in granular detail, so that we see how she falls deeper and deeper into her life of deception. Unbeknown to all, she uses money from the first life to finance her second. To the clueless citizens of Pierson, Ill., she is a dedicated public servant, a municipal booster, a nothingburger known for her intimate understanding of the town’s finances and her humdrum existence as the unmarried daughter of a man who ran a farm-supply business.īut outside of town, she is Reba, a glamorous, mysterious and disciplined buyer and seller of art, a sophisticated patron of artists with connections in Chicago, New York and abroad. Ripley,” to which this book is a stylish homage. How will you, the town’s meticulous comptroller and keeper of the paper receipts, hide your crimes when email comes to town? “Why did everything have to get harder, all the time?” gripes Becky Farwell, the heroine of Emily Gray Tedrowe’s new novel, THE TALENTED MISS FARWELL (Morrow, 352 pp., $26.99), who faces this very problem.īy this time, Becky has fully embraced a double life, just as Tom Ripley does in “The Talented Mr. Imagine your dismay if, after embarking on a scheme to embezzle millions of dollars from a small Midwestern municipality, you are faced with the news that its accounts are migrating from paper to computer. The ending runs away with itself a bit, but we happy to keep up. Subplots blossom and sometimes wither, and Macmillan merrily leads us down many wrong paths, all the while examining the gap between fact and fiction and the relationship between author and subject. Alarmingly, Dan has neglected to mention that he put the new house in his own name. Maybe Lucy killed her brother all those years ago. What else is she hiding? It turns out that Dan has possibly been sleeping with their hot new neighbor while conspiring to gaslight his wife. Things get really complicated when Dan goes missing, in what looks to be a “Gone Girl”-style twist, and Lucy’s past becomes public. It was a horrible scandal and is still an unsolved mystery, and Lucy, who claimed she doesn’t know what happened, has changed her name and tried to put it behind her. Surprise! Dan celebrates by secretly using his wife’s money to buy a fancy house in her least favorite neighborhood, near the woods where she and her baby brother wandered one night years earlier, only for her to return without him. Eliza is not pleased at the prospect of being written out of Lucy’s books neither is Lucy’s editor. When the book begins, Lucy has just finished her latest novel, in which she has given Eliza an “incapacitating” injury that appears to involve a disfiguring injury to her neck. “I honestly don’t think your work is going to win any prizes, do you?” he says to his wife. Dan, Lucy’s husband, is a thwarted novelist whose lack of success has made him jealous, greedy and spiteful.