Maternal Instinct

April 1, 2019
Inspired by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Masterman’s intriguing fourth Brigid Quinn thriller (after 2017’s A Twist of the Knife) supposes that Dick Hickock and Perry Smith didn’t act alone when they killed the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959. For Brigid’s upcoming wedding anniversary, her husband, Carlo DiForenza, has the perfect gift, a memento from his days as a prison chaplain—a sketch by Hickock. Retired FBI agent Brigid has been obsessed with the notion that Hickock and Smith were also guilty of murdering a family of four in Florida a month after the Clutter slayings, a crime that was never solved. Brigid discovers a letter hidden behind the sketch that leads to a written confession by Hickock implicating a third person, Jerry Beaufort, who was 15 at the time. Now nearly 70, Jerry, who was recently released from prison after serving time for trafficking and drug possession, decides to track down a detective and others involved in the Clutter case. Fearful that modern-day forensics could expose his role in the murders, he’s prepared to kill anyone who could implicate him. After his research reveals Carlo’s link to Hickock, Jerry sets out for Arizona to silence Carlo. Masterman keeps the tension high throughout this page-turner. Agent: Helen Heller, Helen Heller Agency.

December 1, 2023
Everyone thinks Althea Deming is a saint. She is a devout Catholic convert; she performs small acts of service that sometimes go unnoticed. Even her late husband, who silently visits her, agrees. The one person who disagrees is her daughter-in-law, Grace. As a condition of Althea's husband's will, her son and his family must move into the family home, which they renovated to provide an in-law suite for her. Grace endures Althea's passive-aggressive comments and tries to connect with her mother-in-law with little success. Meanwhile, Althea keeps track of the slights she suffers, exacting her revenge in increasingly gruesome ways. But nobody believes Althea capable of a bad deed, and certainly not of murder. When an unexpected ally arrives for Grace, she may be able to be free of Althea forever--but does she have the guts to go through with it? Masterman's latest (after her last Brigid Quinn novel, We Were Killers Once, 2019) features two appealingly unlikable narrators and a smooth ratcheting up of the suspense. A must-read for fans of domestic thrillers.

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October 15, 2023
A Florida man who's lost his father opens his home to his stepmother. Nightmare complications ensue. In the two years since Robert Deming succumbed to kidney disease, Althea Deming, his second wife, has been living in a group facility. Now that Hal Deming has moved back into the house where he grew up and refurbished a sumptuous suite worthy of his imperious stepmother, he and his wife and daughter are ready to welcome Althea into their household. Maybe "welcome" isn't the best word, since Grace Deming instantly recoils at what she sees as her mother-in-law's resentment of the arrangements they've made, and her 13-year-old daughter, Shyla, is soon grieving the effects of the lethal games that Althea's cat, Ruth, plays with Shyla's tortoise, Gonzo. For her part, Althea, who encouraged her husband to roam through Europe searching for Joan, the daughter who ran away from home when she was a teenager, keeps remembering or imagining conversations with Robert in which he confesses to having killed Clare, his first wife, in an episode that pays explicit homage to Rebecca. The seal is set on the dysfunctional family when Grace's mother suggests that Hal and Grace take some time off together, leaving Althea and Shyla to fester with her in their absence. A series of increasingly dreamlike scenes leaves one person dead and the others at odds. Masterman's most original addition to the neo-Gothic canon is the conviction that every member of this shattered family is suspicious of the others, and that they all have abundant justification. A fever dream of family gone disastrously wrong.

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