What Strange Creatures

May 12, 2014
At the start of this captivating mystery from Arsenault (Miss Me When I’m Gone), Theresa Battle—who has a houseful of pets in Thompsonville, Mass., and a dissertation she might never complete—agrees to dog-sit for her brother Jeff’s new girlfriend, waitress Kim Graber. Then Kim’s body is discovered, the police arrest Jeff for the murder, and Theresa sets out to prove his innocence. Kim was obsessed with discrediting a local politician with whom she shared an unpleasant history, but Theresa learns the investigation has unearthed other people’s dark secrets, too. Arsenault deftly blends pet humor and laugh-out-loud moments with the unfolding portrait of complex, multilayered Kim. Only Theresa’s romantic entanglements with an English department colleague and one of Kim’s coworkers, who both have information that could help Jeff, ring a false note. Still, Theresa’s self-deprecating honesty and anecdotes about her dissertation subject, medieval mystic Margery Kempe, are as engaging as her loyalty to her brother and willingness to face unsavory truths about him and herself. Agent: Laura Langlie, Laura Langlie Agency.

July 1, 2014
Theresa Battle blames her perpetually bad fortune when her brother's girlfriend, Kim, disappears while Theresa is pet-sitting her puggle. Secretly, however, Theresa welcomes any distraction from her ho-hum job as candle factory copywriter and from pondering the unfinished dissertation she's been dragging around for years. Then police find Kim's body and quickly arrest Theresa's brother, Jeff, for murder. All Jeff can tell Theresa is that Kim has been obsessed with making a film designed to prove a local prosecutor earned his stellar record by manipulating confused kids to testify favorably for the prosecution. The film, Kim hoped, would ruin the prosecutor and make her YouTube famous. Summoning hidden talents in subterfuge, Theresa tracks down everyone linked to Kim's film, unearthing disturbing questions about the justice system and confronting some harsh realities about her own life's inertia. Arsenault (Miss Me When I'm Gone, 2012) strikes a fine balance between heavy themes, dangerous romances, quirky characters, and wry humor. A literary cousin to Lisa Lutz's Spellman Files series and Lutz's stand-alone, written with David Hayward, Heads You Lose (2011).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)