Survival Instincts

February 1, 2020

Waite follows up the best-selling A Beautiful, Terrible Thing, a memoir about her manipulative husband's betrayal, with a debut novel drawing on similar territory. Fourteen years ago, Anne found her new husband suddenly turning moody and difficult. Now she's on her own, a successful therapist who has taken her 12-year-old daughter and her mom to New Hampshire's White Mountains for some good times together--not the idea of the stranger who has them trapped at gunpoint in a remote cabin.

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May 4, 2020
Waite follows her memoir A Beautiful, Terrible Thing with an unexceptional thriller on similar themes of men’s betrayal and women’s resilience. While on a weekend bonding expedition in the mountains of New Hampshire, therapist Anne Thompson, her teen daughter Thea, and her cheerful, bakery-owning mom Rose, are marched to an isolated cabin by an unknown gunman, who intended to kidnap Thea but decided to take the others as well. While Thea struggles, Anne and Rose’s mental strategizing leads them each into recalling the history of Anne’s abusive relationship with Thea’s now deceased father, while their attacker thinks about how his tortured youth led him to this point. The backstory lays the ground well for the somewhat implausible final twist, but the interactions in the cabin and the psychology of the kidnapper play so close to stereotype that they become tedious. Anne’s failed marriage and anxious parenting also stay close to a default narrative of domestic abuse, leaving Rose, with a steely practicality hiding behind her sweet exterior, the only character likely to catch reader interest. Waite’s straightforward prose, without the support of a more surprising story line, doesn’t create the tension needed for this style of tight suspense. Agent: Myrsini Stephanides, Carol Mann Agency.

May 1, 2020
When a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother are kidnapped, secrets come to the surface as they fight to escape. Single mother Anne, a therapist, has always been close to her daughter, Thea. But now, not long after the two moved from a small town to a lovely new house in Burlington, Vermont, the 12-year-old has turned surly and uncommunicative. Anne prescribes herself a weekend getaway with Thea and Rose, a warmhearted bakery owner who is Anne's mom and Thea's beloved "Mimi." But when they go out for a short hike in a remote (read: no cell signal) park on a bitterly cold day, the three are abducted by a stranger, who takes them at gunpoint to an isolated cabin. Thea was badly injured when he attacked them, the temperature is plummeting, their captor's intentions are mysterious but clearly not kind, and they must rely on each other. Point of view changes with each chapter, moving among Anne, Thea, Rose, and the nameless man. Each character's past comes into play, notably Anne's marriage to Thea's abusive father, although all of them have dark secrets. Some of the backstories contain crucial revelations--Rose is a lot steelier than she looks--but sometimes they go on at such length that the tension of the abduction sags. Thrillers often hinge on coincidence and improbable circumstances, but this one strains credulity with some, such as an unusual medical condition revealed late in the plot. Waite wrote a successful memoir, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing (2017), about her marriage to a con man, and that experience resonates in this novel. But awkward prose and structural weaknesses make it less than compelling. Loose pacing and improbabilities mar a sometimes-stirring story of women fighting back.

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May 15, 2020
Waite's 2017 memoir, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing, placed her duplicitous, abusive marriage under a magnifying glass. Putting that experience to work here, she tells intertwined stories in three voices: protagonist Anne now lives in safety after leaving a brutal marriage, with the sometimes-harrowing novel looking back at her awful married life; Anne's daughter, Thea, is a quiet teen, trying hard to get along in their new Vermont town while nursing a crush on a teacher; and in the background is Rose, Anne's mother, who will do anything for her family. The three are on a girls' weekend away when Thea is attacked, and they are taken prisoner by a raging stranger who seems willing to let the vulnerable girl die. This affecting look at familial and maternal bonds keeps readers wondering until the end what the man's motivation could be. The abusive marriage that's shown in flashbacks is convincingly drawn, and the drama that unfolds over one long day of imprisonment also feels all too real. Give this to fans of psychological thrillers and of strong female characters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)