Fractured

In her latest novel (after Smoke), McKenzie stacks puzzle upon puzzle and lays them out in a seemingly tranquil community in Cincinnati. Julie Prentice and her family have moved to Mt. Adams in an effort to start fresh and escape from their recent past. After publishing a crime novel Julie has garnered a lot of attention, some good and some very bad. Part of the bad is a stalker, and she's the reason for the new start in Ohio. Julie strikes up a friendship with her new neighbor John Dunbar and thinks for a brief time that her troubles are behind her. But a series of events makes Julie once again the center of controversy in her neighborhood and now someone is harassing her family once again. Is it her stalker, or someone closer? Telling the story in alternating points of view (Julie's and John's), McKenzie is able to build suspense with two possibly unreliable narrators. She combines suburban angst with real danger to great effect, so that this novel feels like Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap crossed with Sophie Hannah.