WE WOULD NEVER

When an author is murdered, his soon-to-be-ex-wife is the number one suspect.

“‘Here’s what we know so far,’ says a reporter standing in the front yard of a blue Victorian house, yellow police tape visible behind her. ‘Noted writer and popular professor Jonah Gelman was inside his Binghamton home a block from the SUNY campus when he was shot once in the chest.’” As Mirvis’ dark family drama opens, Hailey Gelman is rewatching television coverage of her husband’s murder, rereading accusatory comments on social media, and reviewing the events that have brought her and her 6-year-old daughter to a remote cabin outside Bangor, Maine. First, her marriage soured; while she was miserable living far from her family in Florida, Jonah had gotten bored with the sunny—but far less intellectual—woman he had married. "She had no idea that the qualities in her that he was so drawn to would eventually be the ones he came to despise." Then, the divorce moved forward with acrimony and angry emails about custody; when Hailey tried to retreat to her supportive family in Florida, Jonah demanded she return in a week, as promised. The strength of the novel rests on Mirvis’ portrait of the Floridian enclave: Hailey’s adoring but controlling mother and her stern father and mercurial older brother, doctors whose shared dermatology practice yields some metaphorical pizzazz via disgusting skin conditions. The emphasis here is less on solving the crime than on the characters’ moral struggles as they live with the uncertain outcomes of their own decisions and those of the people they love.

Propulsive, disturbing, and practically begging for a screen adaptation.