In 3 new thrillers, women grapple with old betrayals

In three new thrillers, young women grapple with the horrific events of their childhoods, many years after the fact. But no amount of time is enough to escape the betrayals of family.

What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown

The protagonist of Janelle Brown’s absorbing and well-crafted seventh novel goes by more than one name. She’s narrating the story some 20 years after she fled an isolated life in rural Montana with her father, Saul, an anti-tech, Unabomber-like figure. She is still haunted by her own failures as well as her love for him. Having escaped to start a new life in San Francisco at the onset of the dot-com boom, Jane, also called Esme, navigates friendship and romantic love for the first time. Meanwhile, her father hunts down his former tech colleagues one by one. The mutual betrayals of father and daughter are the thread between them as the narrator reflects on the shocking pace of the social changes that accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley.

With a Vengeance by Riley Sager

In Riley Sager’s new novel, Anna Matheson is still reeling 12 years after losing her entire family in 1940s Philadelphia. Conspiracy and sabotage painted her father a war criminal, and he was convicted of sending a train full of soldiers to their deaths. Anna’s brother was on the train, and her mother took her own life in the aftermath. Now, armed with evidence to prove the complicity of the six people responsible, Anna sets out on a preposterous plan: to trap everyone on an overnight train, and confront them with the knowledge that they will all be arrested as soon as they arrive in Chicago. She expects them to live with their guilt the same way she’s had to live with the pain — except they don’t; they start dying, one by one. With its obvious allusions to Agatha Christie, Sager’s latest works better as a thriller than a historical novel, but he knows how to keep us briskly moving between theories of the case. The book occasionally gives us whiplash but ultimately drives on to a satisfying if complex solution.

The Missing Half by Ashley Flowers with Alex Kiester

Flowers and Kiester give us a less neatly resolved conclusion but more artfully drawn characters. The novel starts out as a reflection on lost girlhood in the Rust Belt between Michigan and Indiana. Nic Monroe has been struggling ever since her sister mysteriously disappeared seven years ago — her car found abandoned, purse and phone on the front seat — two weeks after the similar abduction of another young woman. The authors capture the tragedy of a life suspended in amber. When Jenna, the sister of the other victim, seeks Nic out, the two team up to see if they can uncover any motive the investigators missed. Nic has a lot to learn and Jenna has a lot to teach as they pore through the secrets of their sisters’ cut-short lives. Flowers, a true-crime aficionado who hosts the massively popular podcast “Crime Junkie,” uses her expertise as the amateur sleuths put together puzzle pieces that the professionals couldn’t make fit.

This is an excerpt from a Washington Post story.