MISTER TENDER'S GIRL

After Alice spends years working to get over her tragic past, her life is about to become as terrifying as the graphic novels her father used to write featuring a demonic bartender called Mister Tender.

Twenty-eight-year-old Alice Gray loves her life in Manchester, New Hampshire. She owns a coffee shop called Stone Rose and a nice house, and though she needs to have an upstairs tenant to help pay the mortgage, Richard, a nurse, is quiet and friendly. Alice wasn’t always Alice Gray, though. She grew up in England as Alice Hill and has a tragic claim to fame: when she was 14, twins Melinda and Sylvia Glassin, who had befriended her, stabbed her nearly to death after claiming to receive letters ordering them to do so by Mister Tender, the main character in a graphic novel series drawn and written by Alice’s father. To her horror, Alice now receives a package containing what seems to be an unpublished book called Mister Tender: Last Call with a message in her father’s handwriting—but her father was murdered three years ago in London, and his killer was never caught. Also included is a website address, where she discovers that photos and details from her life have been posted by someone called Mr. Interested. When he sends a blast from her troubled past to terrorize her, she decides she’s finished with being a victim. Her quest takes her to London—the home of the newly paroled Glassin twins—and back, with the promise of violence at every turn. Alice also has to worry about the health of her vulnerable, bipolar 24-year-old brother, Thomas, who is putty in the hands of their domineering mother. Wilson (Revelation, 2016, etc.) puts Alice through the wringer, but she’s a very capable woman. A blazing fast pace and spine-tingling set pieces make the book hum, but it’s the character of damaged yet indomitable Alice that drives this razor-sharp thriller.

Wilson turns the creep factor up to 11, balancing his prose on a knife's edge. A highly satisfying high-tension thriller.