BEHIND THE LIE

More domestic-based skulduggery for ex–NYPD officer Laney Bird, this time emanating not from her home but from that of her neighbor and best friend.

As in Laney’s debut, Hide in Place (2021), Naymark kicks off with a bang, as Oliver Dubois, head scientist at Calypso Technologies, interrupts an all-out party Laney's friend Holly is throwing by ramming a truck he’s borrowed from Step and Vera Volkin into his own front door. The chaos that ensues is multiplied even further when the guests find Step shot in the butt and Vera missing. Asking not whodunitbut how’s that again, the tale skips back and forth between present and past and between the two friends. Laney keeps asking her son, Alfie, a 15-year-old who’s already lived through enough melodrama for a lifetime, if he got into her safe and took the gun that the Sylvan Police Department has identified as the weapon that shot Step. Paranormal romance novelist Holly's pretense of having it all is undermined by the fact that she’s been “cannibalizing her own well-being” to support her adult brothers, one of them a divorced veteran of addiction and rehab, the other suffering from lymphoma. A particularly loaded flashback shows Holly rescuing Vera from drowning, correcting the mistake she made 20 years ago when she failed to save her drug-addled sister, Abigail Spencer, from just such a fate, and Oliver, whom she’d suspected of being sweet on Abigail, had pulled Holly from the water instead. The complications (and there are plenty more) that follow are florid but not believable or even particularly suspenseful, especially given the assurance that Laney is presumably marked for survival.

You have to sympathize with the franchise heroine, who finds herself “losing track of the victims in this mess.”