To the clueless citizens of Pierson, Ill., she is a dedicated public servant, a municipal booster, a nothingburger known for her intimate understanding of the town’s finances and her humdrum existence as the unmarried daughter of a man who ran a farm-supply business.īut outside of town, she is Reba, a glamorous, mysterious and disciplined buyer and seller of art, a sophisticated patron of artists with connections in Chicago, New York and abroad.

Ripley,” to which this book is a stylish homage. How will you, the town’s meticulous comptroller and keeper of the paper receipts, hide your crimes when email comes to town? “Why did everything have to get harder, all the time?” gripes Becky Farwell, the heroine of Emily Gray Tedrowe’s new novel, THE TALENTED MISS FARWELL (Morrow, 352 pp., $26.99), who faces this very problem.īy this time, Becky has fully embraced a double life, just as Tom Ripley does in “The Talented Mr. Imagine your dismay if, after embarking on a scheme to embezzle millions of dollars from a small Midwestern municipality, you are faced with the news that its accounts are migrating from paper to computer. The ending runs away with itself a bit, but we happy to keep up. Subplots blossom and sometimes wither, and Macmillan merrily leads us down many wrong paths, all the while examining the gap between fact and fiction and the relationship between author and subject.

Alarmingly, Dan has neglected to mention that he put the new house in his own name. Maybe Lucy killed her brother all those years ago. What else is she hiding? It turns out that Dan has possibly been sleeping with their hot new neighbor while conspiring to gaslight his wife. Things get really complicated when Dan goes missing, in what looks to be a “Gone Girl”-style twist, and Lucy’s past becomes public. It was a horrible scandal and is still an unsolved mystery, and Lucy, who claimed she doesn’t know what happened, has changed her name and tried to put it behind her. Surprise! Dan celebrates by secretly using his wife’s money to buy a fancy house in her least favorite neighborhood, near the woods where she and her baby brother wandered one night years earlier, only for her to return without him. Eliza is not pleased at the prospect of being written out of Lucy’s books neither is Lucy’s editor. When the book begins, Lucy has just finished her latest novel, in which she has given Eliza an “incapacitating” injury that appears to involve a disfiguring injury to her neck. “I honestly don’t think your work is going to win any prizes, do you?” he says to his wife. Dan, Lucy’s husband, is a thwarted novelist whose lack of success has made him jealous, greedy and spiteful.

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