Since We Fell

March 27, 2017
Set in contemporary Boston, this expertly wrought character study masquerading as a thriller from Edgar-winner Lehane (World Gone By) features his first-ever female protagonist. Once a star journalist, until something snapped during her TV coverage of the devastation in Haiti following the 2009 earthquake, Rachel Childs now barely leaves her house. Lehane portrays the frantic hamster wheel of waxing and waning anxiety with unnerving clarity. A lifetime of tension, much of it spawning from her now-deceased mother’s refusal to disclose the identity of Rachel’s father, weighs on Rachel. The quest to put a name to half her DNA is what first sets Rachel on a collision course with Brian Delacroix, a PI (or so he claims) who advises her against the whole thing. Fast forward several years, and Rachel and Brian meet again. Their eventual marriage is romantic and life-affirming, as Brian coaxes Rachel through the swamp of her psyche, until it’s suddenly not. The book’s conspiracy plot doesn’t cut the deepest; it’s Lehane’s intensely intimate portrayal of a woman tormented by her own mind. 15-city tour. Agent: Ann Rittenberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary.

September 4, 2017
Reader Whelan captures the complexity of the protagonist and suspense of Lehane’s psychological thriller set in contemporary Boston. The story revolves around Rachel Childs, the once rising star TV news reporter whose career ended in 2009, when she melted down on-air while covering the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. In the years since, Rachel has remained jobless and emotionally shattered, and become prone to panic attacks. She attributes her crippling anxiety to her absent father, who abandoned her when she was five. Rachel, now in her late 30s, rarely leaves the house except to investigate the identity of her father, which she sees as the antidote to her mental issues. That’s how she meets Brian Delacroix, a handsome and charismatic private eye, who becomes her new source of stability and eventually her husband. Yet one bump in the road of married life, and Rachel loses control leading her to conspiracy theories about her husband. Whelan pulls the listener along this ever-twisting plot with a cool, low-key delivery that allows Lehane’s clean, proficient prose to flow easily without any embellishments. She keeps characterizations of supporting characters, such as Brian and Rachel’s mom, to a minimum, but the dialogue is delivered naturally and easy to follow. Whelan excels at subtly voicing Rachel’s interior state as she grows from insecure, agoraphobic recluse to a take-charge woman of action. An Ecco hardcover.

February 15, 2017

After covering tragic events in Haiti, reporter Rachel Childs suffers a mental breakdown on live TV and is fired. Her public trauma leads to divorce and severe agoraphobia. Almost two years later, she has remarried and is finally starting to recover--until the day she spots her husband, Brian, who is supposedly out of the country. When she confronts him, Brian convinces her otherwise, and facts seem to support his story and the existence of a doppelganger. When a mysterious friend of Brian's reappears and divulges new information, she finally follows Brian and his true betrayal is revealed. Rachel's life careens into a nightmare and a fight for her life as she discovers the depth of his deception. The first third of this book details Rachel's background and reads like literary fiction. The latter portion ventures into thriller territory. Rachel's fully-developed character grounds the suspense to ease this shift, and Lehane (Shutter Island; Live by Night) writes with a smooth ease that makes the pages fly by. VERDICT Readers will enjoy going along for the ride in this engrossing story about love, deception, and marital commitment. [See Prepub Alert, 11/7/16.]--Emily Byers, Salem P.L., OR

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016

After a terrible public breakdown, reporter Rachel Childs retreats into herself until she has the good fortune to meet and marry charming businessman Brian. Then she sees something--or at least thinks she does--that puts her whole marriage in question. With a 500,000-copy first printing and a ten-city tour.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2017
Don't zoom through this latest entry in Lehane's illustrious body of work. You'll miss plenty of intrigue, intricacies, and emotional subtleties.The clinical term for what ails journalist Rachel Childs is "agoraphobia." Even if the term didn't appear twice in the novel, it'd be easy enough for the reader to identify--and identify with--her pain thanks to Lehane's delicate, incisive rendering of her various symptoms. They include panic, rage, depression, and, most of all, self-loathing. ("That's who I've become," she thinks to herself. "A creature below contempt.") The reasons behind Rachel's breakdown are likewise cataloged in short, vivid strokes: a childhood spent mostly with her brittle, brilliant mother who refused to tell her anything at all about her father, leading to a yearslong search for that father culminating in desolation and heartbreak. The coup de grace to Rebecca's self-esteem comes when her meteoric rise to prominence as a Boston TV reporter literally crashes from her on-camera nervous collapse while covering the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Through all these jolts and traumas, one person is always around, whether close or from a distance: Brian Delacroix, a witty, handsome Canadian-born businessman whom she first meets as a private investigator, later through his occasional "keep-your-chin-up" e-mails, and then, after she's all but locked herself away in her apartment, outside a South End bar. Brian gradually becomes the only one who can even begin to draw Rachel out of her deep blue funk, first as a confidant, then as a lover, and finally as her husband. Happily ever after? You know there's no such thing in a Lehane novel if you've dived into such rueful, knotty narratives as Mystic River (2001), Shutter Island (2003), and World Gone By (2015). It spoils nothing to disclose that Brian isn't quite who Rachel thinks he is. But as she discovers when she tentatively, gradually subdues her demons to seek the truth, Rachel isn't quite who she thinks she is either. What seems at the start to be an edgy psychological mystery seamlessly transforms into a crafty, ingenious tale of murder and deception--and a deeply resonant account of one woman's effort to heal deep wounds that don't easily show.

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Starred review from March 15, 2017
Lehane is one of our most versatile crime writers: he's done series mysteries (the Kenzie-Gennaro novels), stand-alone thrillers (Mystic River, 2001), horror-thriller blends (Shutter Island, 2003), and large-scale historical novels (The Given Day, 2008), and he's done them all superbly. Now he adds psychological thrillers to his resume. Rachel Childs, the protagonist in this slalom course of a tale, is a mess. She was once a rising television journalist, but an on-camera meltdown sent her career into free fall and left her a virtual shut-in, obsessed with finding her father, who vanished from her life as a child. Everything changes when she falls in love with her own Mr. McDreamy, Brian Delacroix, and he slowly pulls her out of her shell. Then the slalom course takes its most jarring turn: Is Brian hiding something? Well, yes, he's hiding plenty.A lot of thrillers boast twisty plots, but Lehane plies his corkscrew on more than the story line. The mood and pace of the novel change directions, too, jumping from thoughtful character study to full-on suspense thriller, like a car careening down San Francisco's Lombard Street, cautiously at one moment, hell-bent at another. But this narrative vehicle never veers out of control, and when Lehane hits the afterburners in the last 50 pages, he produces one of crime fiction's most exciting and well-orchestrated finalesrife with dramatic tension and buttressed by rich psychological interplay between the characters. Don't be surprised if Since We Fell makes readers forget about that other psychological thriller featuring an unstable heroine named Rachel.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The buzz has already begun for this one and will soon reach ear-shattering levels, aided by the author's 15-city tour and a full component of bells and whistles.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)