The End of Everything

Starred review from May 30, 2011
Fans of Tana French and Kate Atkinson will welcome Abbott's haunting psychological thriller set in what appears to be pre-cellphone suburban America. Lizzie Hood and Evie Verver are two 13-year-old girls who have been best friends for years. A few weeks before their eighth-grade graduation, Evie disappears after school. As the last person to see Evie, Lizzie suddenly becomes the star witness, attention she both covets and dreads. When Lizzie remembers seeing a maroon car cruising in front of their school, the police focus on Harold Shaw, an insurance agent whose car matches her description. Yet Shaw is nowhere to be found, and neither is Evie. As the investigation reaches a fever pitch and Lizzie pursues her own leads, she wonders how well she really knew her friend. Evie's boisterous, joke-cracking father lends emotional support. Abbott (Bury Me Deep) expertly captures the nuances of lost innocence and childhood friendships, without ever losing an undercurrent of menace.

May 1, 2011

Edgar Award–winning crime writer Abbott's sixth novel (Bury Me Deep, 2009, etc.) is a change of pace: a delicate skein of fantasies and obsessions, shared by two adolescent girls and shadowed by an abduction.

Lizzie and Evie are thick as thieves. Next-door neighbors, they are tomboys who think nothing of getting banged up in a hockey game. The 13-year-olds are on the cusp of puberty, and all the revelations it will bring. Lizzie, the narrator, is fascinated by the Ververs. Aside from Evie, there is her older sister Dusty, impossibly beautiful and glamorous, and Mr. Verver, the most fun dad you could imagine. Lizzie's own dad has split after an ugly divorce. She has the feeling something momentous is coming, and then it does: Evie disappears. Lizzie recalls that Evie had a secret admirer, an older man who would watch her at night, standing in the yard. It doesn't take long to figure out that it's Mr. Shaw, a married middle-aged insurance agent, who has driven Evie away. (The location is Anyplace, U.S.A.) The crime element is handled perfunctorily. Abbott's spin on the situation is what's important: the possibility that Evie, a willing conspirator, wanted this attention from an older man. After all, thinks Lizzie, doesn't she have her own huge crush on Mr. Verver? And maybe Mr. Shaw was driven "by the purest, most painful love"? Abbott guides us skillfully through Lizzie's hothouse fantasies, but at the expense of action. There's a long wait for a break in the case. It comes awkwardly, casting Shaw's wife in an especially strange light. But it's engineered by Lizzie, who resorts to fibs as she dramatizes her role ("I feel so powerful, like a god"). The real drama, though, is next door at the Ververs. Right at the end, Dusty reveals a furious sibling rivalry, under the nose of the oblivious Mr. Verver. What do adults know? 

A tangled tale that is more provocative than illuminating.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2011

Thirteen-year-old Lizzie's best friend has disappeared, and as family and police hunt for her, Lizzie finds herself the center of attention. That's scary--but also a little heady. Edgar Award winner Abbott should do well.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2011
Thirteen-year-old Lizzie has been best friends with her classmate, Evie Verver, forever. Now the drowsy, breathless haze of early sexuality is working its dark alchemy on them, though its working on Evie faster. More and more, Lizzie thinks, Evie isnt exactly Evie any longer. Then Evie vanishes. A few days later, Lizzie seizes upon a random memorya car that circled the block twiceto point the finger at a neighbor. While the police hunt for the abductor, Evie capitalizes on a long-dormant fantasy of becoming the supportive, grateful daughter the magnetic Mr. Verver never had. Lizzies dreamy, first-person narrative freely skips backward and forward through time, and her languid personal investigation into the crime has the same gliding, impulsive feel of everything else about girls of that age. She just does things, without good reason, on instincts that, though twisted, are true. Explanatory monologues weaken the closing chapters; nevertheless, Abbott, well-known as a hard-edged noir author (Bury Me Deep, 2009) has crafted a unique mystery lush with sensory details.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)