Not Bad People

March 4, 2019
Set in Australia, Scott’s quiet debut centers on three lifelong friends: Melinda Baker, the successful CEO of a direct-sales jewelry company; Aimee Verratti, an obsessive-compulsive wife and mother; and Lou Henderson, a single mom struggling paycheck-to-paycheck. On New Year’s Eve, the three friends perform a letting-go ceremony, inscribing note cards with all the things they’re going to leave behind and tying them to paper lanterns. As they watch their lanterns float over the town of Hensley, they see a small fire in the distance. The next morning, Aimee reads an article in the paper about a nearby plane crash that seriously injured a deputy high school principal and his teenage son. Convinced that she and her friends mistakenly caused the crash, Aimee grows more and more anxious. Lou and Melinda become concerned that she’ll tell all of Hensley, but they can’t dwell on it for long, as they soon have other issues to deal with, such as Lou’s 16-year-old daughter getting pregnant and trouble with Melinda’s business. Decades of secrets slowly unravel as this small-town mystery crawls to an anticlimactic end. Too much information and not enough action spoil this effort. Agent: Vicki Marsdon, High Spot Literary (New Zealand).

March 1, 2019
After three 30-something friends release candle-driven sky lanterns on New Year's Eve, a small plane crashes nearby. Were they responsible?In Scott's debut novel, the decadeslong friendship among Aimee, Melinda, and Lou in Hensley, Australia, has tied them together from childhood even as their lives have wildly diverged. But because the lanterns they set off from Melinda's balcony during the town's fireworks display behave unexpectedly, Aimee, a married mother of two, becomes convinced that the friends directly caused the plane crash. She begins obsessively driving by the site, inserting herself into the affected family's life and the investigation. Childless Melinda, who has never married, is laser-focused on avoiding scandal as the launch of her jewelry business's initial public offering approaches and she works to take her brand global. And Lou, a once-upon-a-time teenage mother thrown out of the house by her parents, is too focused on her own daughter's actions and choices to pay much attention. And really, with Aimee's history of mental health problems, aren't her obsessions always, frustratingly, groundless? Reminiscent of Liane Moriarty, Marian Keyes, and Celeste Ng, Scott's voice is clear in this solid novel, which explores the not-so-black-and-white concepts of honesty, infidelity, mental health, and friendship against the backdrop of small community life where families and people's choices have intersected for generations. The pacing is slow and the narrative straightforward enough that readers can dip in and out without losing track of the action. Though some characters seem to have been created just to include certain archetypes, the complexity of the female characters and their interior struggles pull the story forward addictively. There are enough red herrings that even the most focused reader won't see the denouement coming.Fans will applaud Scott's painful honesty in portraying her women's choices and actions and the consequences of both.

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