The first paragraph is a warning I ignore just like our protagonist, Amy Whey, does when she opens the door to Roux. Perhaps because it starts off so innocently. A group of suburban women are meeting for their usual “Brain-Dead Mommies Book Club.” Twenty plus of them. The club is Char’s creation so she runs things until the night Angelica Roux shows up, sinks into Char’s leather winged chair and highjacks the club. The drinks are flowing, the women gulping and slurring. After all, this is their night away from husbands and kids. Bring on the G and T. Roux suggests they all introduce themselves since she’s new and, before you know it, they’re all figuring out their spirit animals.
Now that’s something I would have been sucked right into.
The dialogue gets raucous, the tone dangerous, and then Roux introduces the game. “It’s like Never Have I Ever, but for grown-ups.” All you have to do is confess the worst thing you’ve done. Except every round changes—today, last week, last month, last year. Ever. And suddenly Amy realizes Roux knows a secret from her past. A big dark secret. The kind that can blow your domestic life to smithereens. “I could feel it leaking into my bloodstream, spreading like a toxin through me.”
So there you have it, and that’s just the cliffhanger of chapter one.
This is domestic noir, a twisted psychological thriller that raises the stakes threat by threat, reveal by reveal. As an added bonus, Jackson draws an extended metaphor throughout. Amy teaches scuba diving and Jackson hurls us into the deep end of the ocean with just enough air to keep going. We find ourselves exploring wrecks, dredging the silty bottom, and keeping perfectly still as the sharks hover. It’s grim. It’s dark. It involves every kind of domestic issue you can imagine: cheating and betrayal, child abuse, rape, kidnapping, drugs and alcohol, manslaughter. Murder.
Are you ready now? Take a deep breath.
