HARD GIRLS

Versatile literary mockingbird Lennon ventures into the thriller genre, for the most part persuasively.

Things are not as they seem. Jane Pool has a pleasant but dead-end job as an academic administrator, a hometown-sweetheart husband, a cranky but loving preteen daughter; she helps tend to her father, an aging and absent-minded professor; she looks like a typical upstate New York mom in her 30s. But, we discover, this ordinariness is deceptive: part aspiration gone awry, part hopeful mask, part dodge, part cover. Jane's husband's heart has soured, as have her feelings for him; her mother-in-law is eager to alienate her daughter's affections, and has as ammunition the fact that Jane gave birth in prison, a fact her daughter doesn't know from an era about which she's never been told. As the book begins, Jane stumbles across an encrypted email in her spam folder. Her estranged twin sister, Lila, has a lead on the whereabouts of the mother who long ago abandoned them, and Lila invites, or summons, her sister to join in the search. Lennon makes nice use of the initially inexplicable cloak-and-dagger of this, building suspense as the reader puzzles over why all of it—Jane's deeply buried secrets, her sister's elaborate spycraft, their mother's self-vanishing, and more—came to be necessary. The book jumps back and forth in time to good effect, and what we learn about the shocking act of violence that disrupted the girls' youth and eventually separated them helps illuminate their present-tense pursuit of their mother across the Mountain West and beyond. The first 40 pages or so are a hint slow to kindle, and the ending feels hurried, but the middle of this book is tautly suspenseful, cleverly plotted, and psychologically compelling; these are damaged, resourceful women who make intriguingly flawed, flinty protagonists.

A promising opening to what's billed as a series of Hard Girls novels.