From the bestselling team behind the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick The Last Mrs. Parrish and The Wife Stalker, a twisty and psychologically unsettling novel about a woman with no recollection of her past.
THE STRANGER IN THE MIRROR
by Liv Constantine
HarperCollins, July 2021
Addison should be preparing for one of the happiest moments of her life—she’s about to marry a wonderful man—but something is holding her back: she doesn’t know who she really is. A couple of years earlier, a kind driver found her bleeding on the side of a Pennsylvania highway and took her in, but she’s unable to remember how she got there in the first place. Or her own name. Or if she’s already married to someone else. Or why she senses that she may have committed a crime . . . Meanwhile, Julian paces his home in the Boston suburbs, caring for his seven-year-old daughter Valentina and trying to figure out what happened to his loving, caring wife, who disappeared without a trace. She never would have left him and her beloved daughter of her own free will—or would she? As the two storylines hurtle toward a dramatic conclusion, Liv Constantine delivers her trademark blend of tense psychological thrills, glitz and glamour, and jaw-dropping twists.
Liv Constantine is the pen name of sisters Lynne Constantine and Valerie Constantine. Together, they are the bestselling author of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick The Last Mrs. Parrish, The Last Time I Saw You, and The Wife Stalker. Separated by three states, they spend hours plotting via FaceTime and burning up each other’s email inboxes. They attribute their ability to concoct dark story lines to the hours they spent listening to tales handed down by their Greek grandmother.
Joette’s life brings new meaning to the phrase “paycheck to paycheck.” Struggling to afford her mother’s sky-high medical bills and also keep the lights on in her trailer home, Joette needs a break. So, when she spies a briefcase full of money amongst the fiery wreckage of a fatal car accident, she knows she can’t just let it be. Inside is a bounty better than she could have dreamed—just shy of $300,000 in neatly stacked hundreds and fifties. Enough to pay off her debts, give her mother the care she deserves, and maybe even help out a few of her friends. But, of course, the missing briefcase didn’t go unnoticed by the original owner, Travis—a ruthless dealer that’ll stop at nothing to get back what’s his. Joette is way out of her depth, but can’t seem to stop herself from participating in this cat-and-mouse chase. But can she beat Travis at his own game?
Berlin—September, 1945. Two manuscripts are found in the rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war in this slow-burn historical thriller with a dark comic edge with echoes of Thomas Mann and Flann O’Brien. One manuscript is the journal of German spy handler Adrian de Groot, written from a cellar during the Berlin air raids of 1943, following the death of his agent, friend, and former lover Frank Pike. In de Groot’s narrative, Pike is a charismatic Irish socialist and IRA fighter recruited by German intelligence to assist with the planned Irish-German invasion of Britain, but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil and spends his final years languishing in Berlin. While the journal chronicles de Groot’s complicated relationship with Pike and his attempts to keep him in his thrall, it also reveals de Groot’s own psychological struggle—as a bookish homosexual, erstwhile literary translator, and anti-Nazi conservative— to accommodate himself to the murderous regime he works for.
Nora Spangler is a successful attorney but when it comes to domestic life, she packs the lunches, schedules the doctor appointments, knows where the extra paper towel rolls are, and designs and orders the holiday cards. Her husband works hard, too… but why does it seem like she is always working so much harder? When the Spanglers go house hunting in Dynasty Ranch, an exclusive suburban neighborhood, Nora meets a group of high-powered women—a tech CEO, a neurosurgeon, an award-winning therapist, a bestselling author—with enviably supportive husbands. When she agrees to help with a resident’s wrongful death case, she is pulled into the lives of the women there. She finds the air is different in Dynasty Ranch. The women aren’t hanging on by a thread. But as the case unravels, Nora uncovers a plot that may explain the secret to having-it-all. One that’s worth killing for. Calling to mind a Stepford Wives gender-swap, THE HUSBANDS imagines a world where the burden of the “second shift” is equally shared—and what it may take to get there.
Ballet flows through their veins. Dara and Marie Durant were dancers since birth, with their long necks and matching buns and pink tights, homeschooled and trained by their mother. Decades later the Durant School of Dance is theirs. The two sisters, together with Charlie, Dara’s husband and once their mother’s prize student, inherited the school after their parents died in a tragic accident nearly a dozen years ago. Marie, warm and soft, teaches the younger students; Dara, with her precision, trains the older ones; and Charlie, back broken after years of injuries, rules over the back office. Circling around each other, the three have perfected a dance, six days a week, that keeps the studio thriving. But when a suspicious accident occurs, just at the onset of the school’s annual performance of The Nutcracker, a season of competition, anxiety, and exhilaration, an interloper arrives and threatens the delicate balance of everything they’ve worked for.