FICTION

A Game for All the Family

Morrow. May 2016. 419p. ISBN 9780062388292. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062388315. F
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Justine Merrison, a former TV executive, along with her 14-year-old daughter, Ellen, and successful opera singer husband, Alex, move from London to the South Devon countryside. Justine, determined to recover from a hectic career that ended on a sour note, wants to leave it all behind and do "nothing." The family successfully settles in until Justine receives a series of seemingly crank phone calls from a woman with a lisp. With each call, though, it becomes clearer that the caller knows too much about Justine for this to be a case of mistaken identity. At the same time Justine notices that her relationship with Ellen is becoming strained. To find the cause she reads a writing assignment that had obsessed her daughter: a bizarre story, set in the Merrison home, of a young murderess named Perrine and the dysfunctional way her family tries to deal with her. Disturbed by a connection between the calls and the story, Justine begins what could turn into a perilous search for answers.
VERDICT Hannah (Woman with a Secret) has written what could have been a thriller but is instead an odd combination of the suspenseful (Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train) and the satirical (Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette??), with an unbelievable story line and characters whose behaviors are overwhelmingly far fetched, leaving readers befuddled.
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