Perfect Little Children

December 16, 2019
Chance takes Cambridge, England, massage therapist Beth Leeson, the narrator of this wildly off-target domestic thriller from bestseller Hannah (The Next to Die), to the posh community where Flora Braid, her former bestie, and family relocated 12 years earlier after the abrupt end of their friendship. When Beth gets a peek at the Braids’ new place, she’s unsettled, to say the least, to spot her onetime friend and two youngsters, Thomas and Emily, looking as if they had not aged since the last time she saw them 12 years ago. Beth really becomes alarmed when her husband tells her that, based on social media posts, the Braids appear to have been living in Florida for over a decade, after Flora’s entertaining but erratic husband launched a successful tech company there. Determined to find out what happened to Flora and whether she and the children are all right, Beth travels to Florida, where she barrels down an ever-darker road to a jaw-dropping denouement—but given the flimsy characters and incredible plot, readers may have bailed well before then. Hopefully, Hannah will return to form next time.

December 15, 2019
A woman reunited with an estranged friend discovers that nothing about her has changed in 12 years--including the ages of her children--and can't rest until she solves the mystery. Beth Leeson has always wondered what happened to Flora Braid after their friendship fell apart. But the Braids moved away, and they lost touch. Twelve years later, Beth decides to check on her and spies Flora coaxing her two small children, Thomas and Emily, ages 5 and 3, out of their car--which is crazy, because that's how old the kids were when Beth knew them. By now they should be teenagers. And the Braids' youngest child, Georgina, isn't there at all. Beth isn't crazy. She knows what she saw. Her daughter, Zannah, serves as a precocious sounding board for her evolving, and sometimes outlandish, theories: "Even if a science genius invented a drug that stopped people aging, they wouldn't freeze their kids in time at three and five. Those are pain-in-the-arse ages. You might freeze your kids at, like, nine and eleven," Zannah says to refute the idea that Thomas and Emily were part of a genetic experiment. But the simplest explanation they can think of--that the children are Thomas and Emily's younger siblings--doesn't quite add up. Why would Flora give all her children the same names? The question then becomes, how well did Beth really know the Braids? With a combination of social media stalking and amateur detective work, Beth tracks down Flora and her husband, Lewis, in both England and Florida and discovers that her old friends are leading double lives in more ways than one. Initially, the bond between the two women seems too weak to warrant such an intense search, but as Beth considers the problems that Flora might've been dealing with years ago that she hadn't noticed, her curiosity thaws into genuine concern that turns her mission into a moral imperative. Save a friendship, save a life--a surprising lesson for an unusual and absorbing thriller.

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January 1, 2020
Hannah never fails to surprise and entertain, whether with her police procedurals, her Agatha Christie mysteries, or her stand-alones. This one falls into the latter category, with its quotidian setting in which something is terribly wrong. On a whim, Beth Leeson stops by the home of her former best friend, Flora Braid, whom she hasn't seen in 12 years. There she watches Flora letting her children, Thomas and Emily, out of the car. But the children seem to be the same ages they were 12 years ago, not the teenagers they should be now. Later, Beth runs into Flora in town, and Flora runs from her. Beth must confront the guilt she feels for the way their friendship ended, but she isn't about to let go of the Braid family mystery until she gets to the bottom of it, a quest that eventually involves her traveling to Florida and facing mortal danger. Long-buried family secrets corrode the closest of family relationships, and a man's desire for physical human perfection leads to his taking unimaginable actions. A tightly wound tale of love gone awry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2019

When Beth decides to drive by the house of former best friend Flora, whom she hasn't seen in 12 years, she is shocked to spot Flora with children Thomas and Emily. Flora has gently grayed, but the children--five and three when Beth last saw them--look to be exactly the same age. What's going on? More psychological suspense from one of its originators; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

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