Booked & Printed
by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo
The Tribes
by Mari Howes
Dutton
Revenge Plot
Stephanie Wrobel
Few believe themselves susceptible to a charismatic liar. It is easier to believe that high-control groups and individual scammers take in other kindsof people, guileless and inattentive people. When cults and grifters are revealedafter their wrongdoing, spectators often scold the victims, listing all the ways in which the latter should have known and acted differently. Making that kind of inventory is no protection against the potential of becoming trapped in a dangerous scheme. Criminal liars are organized and calculating. They are adept at finding the fragile places in a target’s psyche and pressing them for selfish ends. Even the most intelligent and discerning individuals can become ensnared in a high-control setting, with few ways out. This issue, Booked & Printed finds sleuths who unmask treacherous grifters and examine the paths victims take in their struggles to be free.
In Mari Howes’s debut novel The Tribes, Vermont authorities find a newborn buried in a shallow grave. Soon, Heather Garner is charged with the murder of her son. She is a member of a secretive religious group, The Messiah’s Tribes, and in the frenzied media coverage of the case, Heather attracts the ire and scorn of the entire nation.
When Boston attorney Abby Harris encounters the suspect, she is pregnant with her own first child. Heather’s subservience to the Tribes, especially around its edicts for women and children, disturbs Abby. While she has misgivings about the case, she takes Heather on as a client. Abby’s friends, sure of Heather’s guilt, ostracize her for doing so. As Abby moves from her own doubts to the ongoing revelations of the case, she finds herself in the sights of shadowy individuals operating outside the law—people who long ago pulled Heather into their orbit.
The gripping and skilled structure of The Tribe braids dual timelines. One operates in Heather’s first-person narration. She begins as a teenager in 1996, emotionally lost and struggling during her first year of undergraduate education. Eventually, warped by self-hatred, loneliness, and unaddressed wounds, Heather leaves school. At that delicate moment, a member of The Messiah’s Tribes shows Heather kindness and welcomes her. Even as readers might feel like viewers of a horror movie shouting at the screen, Heather’s vulnerabilities make her convincingly beholden to the Tribes.
The novel’s second timeline focuses the third-person perspective on Abby in 2016. She is a self-reliant big-city attorney who chose to become a single mother. Heather both frustrates Abby and draws on her deepest sympathies. The starkly different destinies of each woman diverge and conjoin. The Messiah’s Tribe members and leaders are characters with convincing seduction and power, showing the tactics high-control groups employ over time.
The suspect and the attorney come to discover the possibilities, pressures, and abuses against mothers that can exist in both a secular professional setting and a cultish one. The passages on Heather’s birthing injuries are vivid with horrors, while Abby and her law firm’s pursuit of the truth under threat keeps the pace heart pounding. The domineering men of The Messiah’s Tribes come into sharper focus with each discovery Abby makes, threatening her own process and aftermath of giving birth.
The Tribe is both a thriller and a contemporary depiction of how mothers make a family. The head of a family can be a mother herself, reveling in the independent ways she can raise a child. Or it can be a nightmarish person who calls himself devout, cutting off all possibilities of freedom, until a mother struggles her way out.
The professional settings of crime novels usually include law offices, police departments, and the shadows of the private eye. In Revenge Plot by Stephanie Wrobel, the mystery’s professional world is that of American publishing. Claudia Conley is a high-powered literary agent in New York City. Aspiring writers clamor to have her represent them, and her list of authors carries weight and prestige throughout the world. She searches for top talent, and she enjoys her top status in a cutthroat industry. One of her authors working under an alias, Jo Stone, commands millions in sales for her serial killer novels.
If Claudia demands an action, her charisma and powerful position forces writers to obey, no matter how much they might fear the consequences of doing so.
The opening of Revenge Plot finds Claudia far from city glamour or the top floors of publishing offices. She is preparing herself an elaborate Christmas dinner, alone, in a remote cabin beset by a snowstorm. A car crash against a tree outside interrupts her solitary festivities. A man and a young boy stagger out of a half-crushed Prius, and Claudia invites them inside.
After genial conversation, the driver, Arnie Tenderton, mentions to Claudia that he is an aspiring novelist, to which she is polite. He is a grateful Christmas dinner guest, at first. Soon, Arnie turns into someone else. He pushes the pages of his unpublished manuscript toward Claudia, demanding that she read.
Here, a book-within-a-book begins. Arnie’s novel describes a young woman writer, Neve White, and her journey to a nom-de-plume under an unscrupulous, controlling, literary agent.
Revenge Plot sparkles with reversals and surprises. It’s a mischievous and exciting mystery, full of inside-baseball details of the publishing world. Between plot twists and cat-and-mouse suspense, the book nods to real-life websites, authors, and literary controversies. It provides send-ups of publishing archetypes: the aspiring authors with few appropriate boundaries, the smart and penniless cool women of creative writing MFA programs, and the elder statesmen authors who believe themselves above it all.
Readers begin the book close to Claudia’s side, like the would-be writers who crowd her each day. As her home invader’s story unfolds, Claudia’s choices reveal the reasons behind Arnie’s, challenging who the true author of any one story might be.
All points bulletin: In S. C. Hunter’s body-horror comedy, Vampire Menstrual Syndrome (Gallery Books), a university student endures the period from hell, and must chase and confront the blood-sucker who ends her mortal life. • Monster in the Mirror (Sourcebooks Landmark) Janasha Prabhu’s debut, portrays Jiah Riah, a young woman found with the corpse of her girlfriend, prompting speculation about her status as the niece of an imprisoned serial killer. When Jiah finds another body years later, she wonders about herself too. • In The Trusted (Blackstone Publishing) by Marisa de los Santos, detective Lina Cordova is the scion of a Filipino doctor and a wealthy local family. Detective Aaron Cash is a hardscrabble transplant from the American south. Together, they find a controversial figure murdered in a cabin, beginning their descent into the secrets of Sheppley, Pennsylvania. • Out of print for almost 50 years, Cop Out by Ellery Queen is being reissued by Hard Case Crime and Titan Books in February 2027. Cop Out is one of two novels by Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (writing together as Ellery Queen) that doesn’t feature the fictional detective Ellery Queen. • Level Best Books launches Level Best Books UK, co-directed by Shawn Reilly Simmons and Martin Edwards.