THE SPLIT

In a taut thriller with two timelines, both are packed with clever twists.

Jane and Esme Connor are sisters, but it’s been years since they were close. When they were teenagers, Esme was seriously injured in a car crash with Jane at the wheel, and things have never been the same. Now they’re in their 20s; Jane has a lucrative job at a financial firm, while Esme has married into a wealthy, socially prominent family. The sisters have recently moved their mother, Marjorie, into a memory care facility, and Jane, the dutiful one, is living in the family home in Connecticut to help care for her. (Marjorie and the girls’ father, Ivy League professor Carl, divorced acrimoniously years ago.) Self-involved Esme, an aspiring writer who never seems to write, is living her busy social life in Manhattan. Then one night she calls Jane, distraught. She’s left her husband and wants Jane to come pick her up at a Midtown bar. That’s the point at which this thriller divides into two timelines: one in which Jane drives through a storm and brings her sister home, and one in which Jane, tired of being used by Esme, tells her no—and Esme vanishes. Jane narrates both timelines, which track clearly in alternating chapters. In both plots, Jane is dealing with a recent breakup with her doctor boyfriend, Jamie, and rekindling a relationship with her teenage crush, Dylan, but with very different results. Esme’s disappearance leads Jane into a desperate search for her sister, but in the other timeline, Jane’s rescue of Esme results in a different set of complications and perils. Frick skillfully builds details into one plot that morph into something shockingly different in the other.

The prose is streamlined, the pace headlong, and the surprises satisfying on both sides of reality.