BEFORE SHE FINDS ME

When the pop pop pop of shots sound off at college move-in day, Julia Bennett is the first to recognize the menace, intuitively dropping and rolling to protect her daughter, Cora. The aftermath brings: a grazed Cora; her murdered stepmother, Brie; long-suppressed memories of Julia’s own troubled past; and her increasing suspicion that what seems like just another random mass shooting in America is actually anything but.

Julia is a botany professor at Anderson Hughes, the San Diego college where Cora will be a freshman. Julia is also a connoisseur of carnivorous plants and is long divorced from Cora’s dad, Eric, who has a shiny new life with Brie. While Julia reluctantly confirms her doubts about the shooting (“If the sniper attack was random, why did it end so quickly? And why weren’t more people dead?” she asks herself), she’s also forced to reckon with the violence that ended her own youth: the shooting deaths of her parents when she was 14. As Julia unpacks the shooting, up in Los Angeles, contract killer Ren Petrovic is realizing she’s got some mysteries of her own to solve. She’s learned about the Anderson Hughes killings on the news and recognizes the work of her husband and partner, Nolan. Ren is a second-generation assassin, raised to take on only “ethical kills,” meaning the target—not the victim, if you please—deserves their fate. But Nolan no longer seems as committed to the mission and has started bending their rules. When it comes out that Brie is the daughter of Oliver Baird, a Malibu billionaire who happens to be Nolan’s best client, the dovetailing of the two women’s stories becomes inevitable. This is author Chavez’s third suspense novel, and she writes well: Before the attack, the packed crowd of students and parents “undulated like a snake digesting”; afterward, Eric “wore the past two days as thick stubble along his jaw and bruise-like smudges beneath his eyes.” The two protagonists nicely mirror each other, sharing a chaotic upbringing, a cerebral reserve paired with extreme capability, a love of mordant plants (Ren’s specialty is poison, and she grows her own). Though the book doesn’t quite stick the landing—for all its tragedy, Julia’s backstory is uninteresting, and Ren’s naïveté is hard to fathom—it’s well paced, often gripping, and builds with expert tension.

Straightforward suspense served without guile or gimmick.