No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done
There are mama bears, and then there’s Sally Lambert, mother of teenagers Ree and Toby, plus Champ the Welsh terrier. She believes “Once you’ve got a dog, you’ve got . . . a canine child who feels absolutely like your flesh and blood even though he or she belongs to a different species.”
Sally’s love for her children and her husband, Mark, is fierce and abiding; so is her loathing for the Gavey family, who surpassed their neighbors-from-hell status the day a police officer informed Sally that Tess, horrible teen daughter of the execrable Lesley and Alastair, had accused Champ of viciously biting her.
Sally knows it’s not true, but she fears for Champ’s life and decides her family must flee their lovely home in Swaffham Tilney, Cambridgeshire, and return only when Champ’s name has been cleared. Some might think No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done, but for Sally it’s a no-brainer: “They can’t kill him if they don’t know where he is.”
A frustrated Mark notes that, while their first Welsh terrier, Furbert, was a bit bitey, “There’s no such thing in British law as canine guilt.” Sympathetic yet concerned Ree says, “I do feel like we’re all kind of . . . trapped in an irrational, menopausal panic attack, maybe?” But Sally’s stalwartness earns her many supporters, including a billionaire neighbor named Corinne plus netizens rallied by Ree and Toby’s hashtags: “#GoneDog” and “#TheFurryFugitive.”
Sophie Hannah, the award-winning, bestselling author of standalone thrillers and the new Hercule Poirot series (at the behest of the Agatha Christie estate), is in fine form here. No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done is rife with hilarious and heartfelt moments, plus intriguing metafictional elements: Who is the unnamed narrator? Is their take on the three (human) deaths that will occur during the Lamberts’ quest for justice remotely accurate? Did the Lamberts, well, do something else? It’s an inventive, suspenseful tale that will especially delight Agatha Christie aficionados, fans of metafiction and dog lovers alike.
Very Slowly All at Once
“Couples pick at each other, little things build, then all of a sudden they’re here in this room,” high-powered divorce lawyer Hailey Evans says in Very Slowly All at Once. “And then after I clean up their mess, they pay me.”
Hailey’s matter-of-fact confidence falters fast when a major client’s refusal to pay a substantial bill puts her job in jeopardy. Her English professor husband Mack’s employment is also under threat: He’s been suspended without pay while his bosses investigate allegations of impropriety with students.
The alarming prospect of financial insolvency, not to mention unseemly scandal, sends the Evanses into a tailspin. Since childhood, Hailey’s longed to live in the tony Bratenahl neighborhood on Ohio’s Lake Erie, and she’s finally living her dream: She and Mack, their two young daughters, and their dachshund, Gulliver, recently moved into a newly built million-dollar house on Magpie Court. But the costs of homeownership are higher than anticipated, the social set not as welcoming as they’d hoped, and bills—including the girls’ pricey private school and Mack’s mother’s assisted-living costs—are piling up. How will they survive? (And can they keep the neighbors from finding out?)
The Evanses make a series of increasingly perilous errors when they begin to cash multithousand-dollar checks mailed from Sunshine Enterprises. Neither recognize the company name, yet both think they know who’s sending the funds, and hope blossoms—only to be dashed as the couple realize the money isn’t coming from someone who wants to help them, but rather a viciously angry person intent on embroiling them in illegality and violence.
Lauren Schott, a ghostwriter and former literary agent, makes her thriller debut with this unsettling, often darkly comedic cautionary tale of ambition gone awry. Schott skillfully keeps tensions nerve-janglingly high as Mack and Hailey become increasingly desperate to figure out who’s tormenting them, all the while striving to maintain their glossy we-belong-in-Bratenahl facade. Plausible suspects menacingly lurk in the background as Hailey laments, “How did this happen to us?” and a mysterious narrator hints at what can happen when people move on up—and into situations beyond their control.