The Plunge
by Lila Raicek
Damon, the faithless Lothario at the heart of this spicy psychosexual drama, is every sane woman’s idea of a toxic boyfriend. “I wanted to see him, desperately, though I knew how terrible it would be if I did,” Liv, the 31-year-old narrator of THE PLUNGE (Park Row, 324 pp., $30), muses after a typically tempestuous interaction. “He had become an inexorable addiction, like a drug rush.”
After a car accident that killed her fiancé just weeks before their wedding and that she barely escaped, Liv has fled to New York. She spends much of her time lounging in a depressed fugue in an older friend’s tiny maid’s room. But then she walks into a labyrinth of intrigue involving Damon — a society jewelry designer and sometime sculptor with a very complicated romantic life — and Isabel, who is glamorous, older and obsessed with him. Both are manipulative in ways Liv can’t begin to anticipate.
This is the first novel by Raicek, a playwright whose liberal reworking of Ibsen’s “The Master Builder” on London’s West End last year explored similar themes of sexual intoxication, cruelty and romantic triangulation. Fittingly for a plot in which emotions are ramped up to 11, Liv has a tendency to speak to Damon as if she’s a femme fatale in a 1940s noir film.
How will this unfortunate romantic entanglement end? (Not well, we suspect.) And more urgently, will the sleazy but dogged journalist digging into Liv’s past find what really happened the night she and her doomed fiancé drove off the cliff?
Artifacts
by Natalie Lemle
When she was an undergraduate at Columbia, Lena Connolly was hired to help excavate a Roman villa at an archaeological dig in the Italian Alps. The summer ended in tragedy when the professor who recruited her abruptly disappeared and Lena was summarily dropped by her hot Italian boyfriend. Doing her best to put it behind her, she is now an adult, working as a trust and estates lawyer at a small firm in New York.
But as ARTIFACTS (Simon & Schuster, 338 pp., $29) begins, the past comes crashing into the present, pulling Lena right back into that fateful summer. Her firm enlists her to investigate allegations that a priceless artifact — a cup made of rare dichroic glass, which changes color depending on how it’s lit — was stolen and then illegally donated to a museum in New York. It may well have been taken from the site she worked on; she might be implicated.
There’s a lot going on in this book, some of it explained in digressive asides that are interesting but can interrupt the flow of the narrative: the evil reach of the Italian mafia’s use of looted antiquities as collateral in drug transactions; how art donation can help rich people avoid taxes; Greek and Roman history and mythology; the ongoing debate over cultural heritage and how it can be preserved. The characters all have complicated back stories and many of them do not get along with one or both of their parents.
Even now, Lena might be in danger from some of the unscrupulous characters she met all those years ago. Can she put her history behind her? “Ancient objects belong only to the past, which will always try to reclaim you,” she thinks. “And to fixate on the past, I remind myself, is to sabotage the present.”
Last Seen
by Lucy Clarke
Exactly seven years after his best friend drowned as the tide pulled them both away, a 17-year-old boy named Jacob has failed to come home after a night out. The police think he has run away, or maybe killed himself. But a few people he knew were very angry at him before he disappeared.
At first, LAST SEEN (Atlantic Crime, 439 pp., paperback, $18) seems like a simple story about a couple’s frantic search for their missing son. But the seemingly placid beach community where the book takes place is pulsating with deception. Who knew how many uncomfortable secrets its residents were concealing?
Through two dueling narrators — Jacob’s mother, Isla; and Sarah, Isla’s closest friend and the mother of Marley, the boy who died in the incident Jacob survived — the story toggles between past and present. Consider what it must be like when two children go into the water, and yours is the one who doesn’t return.
“It seemed impossible, back then, to imagine that anything could come between us,” Isla muses, about the origins of her friendship with Sarah, which was as emotionally intense as a love affair. The tensions between them, it turns out, go way back.
Clarke’s revelations are genuinely surprising without being absurd, and they’re expertly paced. I was not prepared for the wrenching one at the end.
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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