No Turning Back

April 10, 2017
British author Buchanan (After the Life) makes her U.S. debut with a melodramatic serial killer thriller. While radio show personality Anna Graves is walking with her eight-month-old daughter, Joni, along the beach of Ridgmont Waters, the village where she grew up, a teenage boy attacks her with a knife. Her assailant, soon to be identified as Elliot Nunn, a boy from the “deprived docklands area,” takes a fatal fall onto the comb she pulls out of her bag to protect herself and Joni. Witnesses and the police agree that it was self-defense, so why does Anna feel so terrible? When poison is discovered in Elliot’s system, it harkens back to the Ophelia Killer, whom Anna’s father, a journalist, was investigating when he jumped to his death. At this news, everyone in Ridgmont Waters, even Anna’s ex-husband, Guy, turns against her, but she finds an unlikely ally in Elliot’s older brother, Jamie. When another teen’s body is found, Anna is afraid a killer may be closing in on her family. The final denouement, obviously meant to be shocking, defies all credibility. Agent: Caroline Hardman, Hardman & Swainson (U.K.).

May 1, 2017
A news presenter makes news herself when she kills a schoolboy to defend her baby girl.After her first day back on the job as co-host of a call-in radio show, anxious new mother Anna Graves takes her infant daughter, Joni, for a walk along the beach in her seaside village on England's south coast. She's already feeling threatened by scruffy teenagers when a wild-eyed boy in a school uniform runs up to her and pulls out a knife. All Anna has for protection is a long-toothed comb, but it's sufficient to kill him in a scuffle. She's not charged with his death, which was clearly self-defense, and when the tragedy goes public, many admire her for bravely protecting her child. But when a minor indiscretion she'd committed with a married co-worker comes to light, suddenly Anna the hero is Anna the adulterer, and her guilt about that brief incident adds to her lacerating remorse about killing the boy. He would have died anyway; he was dosed with digitalis, just like the victims of the mysterious Ophelia Killer, who 20 years earlier used the same drug on teenage boys and left their bodies floating in garden ponds surrounded by flowers. Anna's father, an investigative reporter, had become so obsessed with the case that he threw himself from the top of their lighthouse after an argument with Anna. She's never forgiven herself for accusing him of neglecting his family, and she has guilt to spare for telling off a bullying co-worker. Her life goes from bad to worse when speculation that she might be an Ophelia Killer copycat makes the local detective eye her with new interest. As her friends abandon her and she begins to doubt herself, her only support is from her loyal grandmother and a much less likely source. Nothing, however, prepares her for the horror when the real killer comes after her. Readers' sympathy for Buchanan's (The Lost Mother, 2016, etc.) suffering heroine will be sorely tried by her endless wallowing as momentum builds toward an over-the-top denouement.

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May 1, 2017
Radio personality and newly single mum Anna Graves accidentally kills a teenage boy who had been coming after her and her baby daughter. As if her guilt weren't enough to produce sleepless nights, Anna begins receiving e-mails from a murderer believing them to be kindred spirits. Could it be the Ophelia Killer, whose rampage 20 years earlier led Anna's father to commit suicide? First-person chapters narrated by the killer detail his first forays into murder, slowly unspooling in such a way as to leave the reader unable to guess his identity. Anna's fear, exhaustion, and mama-lion devotion to her daughter are palpable. A suspenseful woman in jeopardy debut from British writer Buchanan.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)