TAKE ME, TAKE ME WITH YOU

Damaged-woman thriller by pseudonymous Kelly, who gives us a touch of the old Jim Thompson about a good girl going bad—maybe all the way to hell.

Kelly tells her tale on parallel tracks, hopping between 1970 and the early 1990s. All that Lara Quade can remember about her mother’s last drunken days is that she drove too fast on black ice and rammed their car, with six-year-old Lara and older brother Ryan, into a moving train at a country crossing. Lara (then named Lorraine) was scarred all over her body. She now works as a research assistant at a Princeton think-tank, helping her 320-pound male administrator assemble a thousand-page tome about talking dolls and other automata—perhaps she sees herself, as well, as a damaged doll (she even collects dolls for her apartment). Someone unknown sends her a free ticket to a concert, where a big lunk in a leather jacket takes the seat beside her. Little as she’s attracted to him, Lara nonetheless invites Zed Dewsofski home with her, drinks gin, and fights with him. Next thing she hears is that her administrator, who wanted to take her to Las Vegas with him, has been beaten in his garage and may not live. Lara tracks down and confronts Zed in far-off Strykersville and discovers that he’s the son of her late father, who was sent to Attica for murdering Zed’s mother. But maybe Lara’s mother did the deed, not her father. What’s more, Zed is Lara’s half-brother—and by now they can’t keep their hands off each other. It’s unfair to tell more, but incest runs deep and strong, while Lara confronts her full brother Ryan about Mom: Did she murder her husband’s mistress?

A racy plot that reminds strongly of Thompson’s classic incester, The Grifters.