A Simple Favor

January 9, 2017
In Bell’s convoluted debut, widowed mommy-blogger Stephanie Ward receives a call from her best friend, Emily Nelson, asking her to pick up Emily’s five-year-old son, Nicky, from school. There’s an emergency at work, Emily explains, but she’ll be by to get Nicky no later than 9 p.m. Nicky is best friends with Stephanie’s son, Miles, and the boys attend the same suburban Connecticut kindergarten, so Stephanie agrees. Days pass and Emily never appears, leading Stephanie to fear the worst. Emily’s husband, Sean, returns home from his European business trip and calls the police, who assume that Emily has simply run away—until her body washes up at her family’s lake house in Michigan. Stephanie initially seeks to comfort Sean, but when questions arise surrounding Emily’s death, she’s left wondering what is true and whom to trust. While Stephanie, Emily, and Sean share the narrative, Stephanie is the primary point-of-view character, and her vacuity and naïveté undercut the story’s tension and heft. Bell further squanders an intriguing setup with ill-defined stakes and tired, telegraphed plot twists. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary Agency.

January 15, 2017
An insecure woman with an edgy past insinuates herself into the lives of a narcissistic, glamorous couple and finds herself in jeopardy.The formula is familiar: Bell's debut is a pale facsimile of The Girl on the Train. True to template, the novel tells the same story from the differing and self-serving perspectives of three narrators. Stephanie is a blogger who writes about mom issues. Recently widowed and raising small son Miles alone, she overshares all manner of anxieties on her blog. Her husband and her half brother died together in a tragic auto crash, but later we learn the edgy part: her husband had suspicions about her ongoing affair with her half brother. Stephanie forms a play-date friendship with fellow Connecticut mom Emily, a busy publicist for a top Manhattan fashion designer. Certainly, Emily has an unusual fondness for serial-killer movies and Patricia Highsmith novels--and, thanks to her high-powered job, is always sticking Stephanie with the kids--but Stephanie thinks, and blogs, that she's finally found a true friend. The two do share a common dysfunctional past: estrangement from Midwestern parents. After Emily disappears during a business trip, however, the POV shifts to her, and we learn that she and her Wall Street trader husband, Sean (who's the third narrator), planned to fake her death in order to cash in on a $2 million life insurance policy so they and their son, Nicky, could escape the rat race. From here, the typical who's-playing-whom standoff between the three principals unspools, and violence accelerates. There are plenty of rationalizations cited by Sean and Emily as to why their scam makes sense, in spite of the likelihood that $2 million is a drop in Sean's annual bonus bucket, and, in any case, how much time away from the rat race would it really buy? This is just one of many unconvincing motivations driving the plot, which will amply satisfy readers' lowest expectations. More like "girl on a train wreck."

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October 15, 2016
Widowed mommy blogger Stephanie gladly helps Emily by picking up her five-year-old son, Nicky, at school. After all, she and Emily are best friends, as are their two sons. But Emily doesn't show up at Stephanie's to get Nicky at day's end. One big debut, with a 100,000-copy first printing, rights sold to 24 countries and territories, and film rights preempted by Fox 2000.

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