January 16, 2025
An early scene is full of promise. Teenager Lila witnesses a creep roofie-ing her twin sister, Jane. She bashes his head in with a concrete candelabra and dumps his body in a swamp. An imperfect solution to say the least, so ""the next time she killed somebody she didn't make the same mistake."" This is the second title in Lennon's saga of Jane and Lila Pool, following Hard Girls (2024). It's a similar mix of high-class crime fiction and expository prose. Jane is trying to be good. She's off to a writers' retreat, hoping to use writing to understand the mess of her past. Lila suffers no such compunction, what's in it for her? She's a mysterious agent for a mysterious government agency, seeking to end a long separation from Jane for her own reasons. Like finding out what really happened to their mother, or what their bookworm father was really up to. Answers come in time-jumps that may seem overlong and over-complicated; it's a matter of taste. Though nothing quite equals the candelabra scene, there is some beautiful writing here.
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