An Inconvenient Woman

July 15, 2020
The inaugural title in Otto Penzler's new Scarlet imprint of psychological and suspense fiction is a razor-sharp debut that dumps two Los Angeles women with troubled family histories into a blender and cranks the speed up to liquefy. Freelance French instructor Claire Fontaine told everyone who would listen that her father tried to drown her as a child because the woman he was seeing hated children and that Claire's ex-husband, wealthy Simon Miller, had his eye on her teenage daughter, Melody, and may even have drowned her five years ago to cover up his predation. In the end, though, nobody would listen, and now Simon, tired of being labeled "CHILD MOLESTER" by the paint Claire has slapped on his house and car, wants to take strong measures against her. So he hires Sloan Wilson, an ex-cop-turned-"sin eater" who specializes in making people's problems go away, to make Claire go away. Sloan's own background is so dark--her father abruptly retired from the LAPD after his wife accused him of corruption and killed herself--that it's a marvel she isn't cracking herself under the strain. Or is she? After circling warily around her two leads as Claire shuttles from one disturbing pupil to the next and Sloan cultivates Destiny, a girl from the streets whom Claire had befriended, Buelens dives more and more intimately into the traumas that mark them as opposites even as they reveal their profound twinship. A piercing, high-speed nightmare best consumed in a single breathless sitting.

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July 27, 2020
French teacher Claire Fontaine, the unhinged protagonist of Buelens’s pedestrian debut, is convinced that her ex-husband, Simon Miller, a wealthy Beverly Hills lawyer, molested Melody, her daughter by her late first husband, driving the teenager to suicide. Simon claims Melody’s drowning death was an accident. Claire has now made it her mission to stop his upcoming wedding to Charlotte. Claire believes that Simon really is after Charlotte’s daughter, Emma, who’s about the same age as Melody when he first molested the girl. Claire considers more extreme actions after she has no success confronting Simon over the phone or persuading Charlotte, whom she confronts at the jewelry store where Charlotte works, to keep Emma away from Simon. Frustrated by Claire’s antics, Simon hires “sin eater” Sloane Wilson, a former LAPD detective who specializes in cleaning up situations best handled outside the law. A couple of clever twists near the denouement make up only in part for Claire’s wearisome paranoia and characters who elicit little sympathy. Psychological thrillers fans can safely take a pass.

September 1, 2020
Claire and Sloane both had traumatic childhoods, and the trauma has lasted well into adulthood. Claire's first husband died a painful death, leaving her to bring up their daughter, Melody, by herself?until she meets charming, handsome Simon. They marry, but shortly afterward, Melody dies tragically, and Claire discovers a horrifying secret about Simon that changes her life. Devastated, she divorces him but decides to make him pay and to avenge Melody's death. Tired of Claire's paranoia and her continuing efforts to stalk and confront him, Simon hires Sloane, an ex-cop turned sin eater ?someone who cleans up messes, like a Mob fixer but without the brutality. But Sloane has her own dark secrets, and her efforts to find a way to stop Claire's campaign against Simon bring the two women onto a collision course that could have disastrous consequences. Buelens' story is riveting, with the tension ratcheting up until the end. With twists aplenty, vivid characters, and a palpable sense of looming disaster, readers will find themselves wondering whose story to believe.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)