The Wasp Trap
by Mark Edwards
Seven uneasy people have gathered for dinner in Notting Hill, London, as THE WASP TRAP (Atria, 400 pp., $29) begins. It’s the first time six of them have seen one another since 1999, when they spent a heady, intense summer building a website that was meant to revolutionize online dating by making matches based on psychological testing.
It was an unsettling experience, and there’s a lot to unpack. They lived and worked on a remote countryside estate. Their boss was obsessive and opaque. And then, following a raucous night in which they all drank too much and made some cataclysmic choices, the project was abruptly shut down before it launched, with no explanation.
Now their dinner hosts are behaving oddly, the extra guest’s back story doesn’t add up, and everyone is trapped without cellphone service or Wi-Fi at a fancy townhouse where the high-tech security system has somehow locked them all inside. The purpose is to force them to reveal the secrets they concealed from one another all those years ago. The penalty for failing to participate, or for revealing the wrong secret, appears to be death.
Edwards’s psychological tale starts slowly but moves with increasingly head-spinning velocity as the secrets come spilling out. (I promise you won’t be able to anticipate all the crazy things that happen.) Blackmail, sexual betrayal, unexpected deaths and maybe murder — it’s amazing what a group of supposed tech nerds got up to in the previous millennium.
Clearly there’s a connection to the off-piste psychometric test that one of the group, Lily, devised back then as a way to to ferret out psychopaths in the dating pool — the “wasp trap” of the title. “It will be fine,” she said at the time. “I’ll base it on the same algorithm we’re using for the site.”
Do you want to hear how everyone scored?
Not Quite Dead Yet
by Holly Jackson
Can a dying woman solve her own (imminent) murder? When she receives the unpleasant news that an attack by an unknown assailant has caused her to have a brain aneurysm that will kill her within a week, Jet Mason decides to use this abbreviated time to hunt down the culprit.
Is this scenario medically or logistically plausible? Who knows? But despite its bonkers premise, Jackson’s NOT QUITE DEAD YET (Bantam, 400 pp., $28) is surprisingly suspenseful and compelling, as Jet uses go-for-broke ingenuity to untangle not just the present-day crime, but also old secrets bubbling up at home and in her small Vermont community.
Everyone’s guilty, if not of the attack itself, than at least of something: Jet’s squirrelly brother, her haughty sister-in-law, her sharp-tongued mother, their clearly-hiding-something family friends. It might even be necessary to revisit a tragedy from 2008, when Jet’s sister, Emily, drowned in the family swimming pool, her long hair gruesomely trapped in the filter.
Jackson is known for her Y.A. novels — this is her first adult thriller — and her sprightliness and pacing sustain the reader’s interest. The revelations come in a flood. Liberated into newfound bravery by her impending demise, Jet makes a winning, wisecracking heroine. Her humor is suitably mordant. Asked one morning if she slept well, she replies, “Like the dead.”
The Vanishing Place
by Zoë Rankin
In Rankin’s sizzling debut, THE VANISHING PLACE (Berkley, 384 pp., $30), a young girl, starving and covered with blood, turns up in a general store in a remote village deep in New Zealand. She blurts out her name — Anya — but refuses to say anything else.
Then the phone rings for Effie, a police officer who fled that very village under terrifying circumstances 17 years earlier and is now in Scotland. An old friend, Lewis, is on the line with some haunting news: The girl, he says, looks just Effie, and it’s a good bet they’re from the same blighted family.
Does this mean that Effie will feel compelled to return home to face up to the unsettling (to say the least) events of her own childhood? Of course it does. But Rankin skillfully finds new ways to plumb this familiar scenario, pulling us back to harrowing events of 2001, and then forward to 2025, as present-day Effie pieces together how her imperfect memories — a mother who died young, a violent father, a life off the grid — are connected to Anya’s plight.
“The Vanishing Place” is a reminder that memory is slippery, that people are capable of both unspeakable cruelty and unbelievable heroism and that the reader shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the characters too soon. It’s about the lure of the landscape, too. “The bush had never left her,” Rankin writes, of Effie. “It had lain dormant in her core, no matter how deep she’d buried it.”
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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