Megan Abbott’s Mysterious Disappearance

The wave of bestselling psychological thrillers by and about women these past few years is due in no small part to Edgar®-winning author Megan Abbott. Her novels Dare Me, The Fever, and You Will Know Me concern the precarious and often dangerous friendships of high school girls. I fervently plowed through each one. Nothing makes a middle-aged mom turn pages faster than grisly cheerleader murders.

That’s why it was with great anticipation I started Abbott’s latest, Give Me Your Hand. It tells the story of Kit and Diane, best friends at seventeen who find themselves together again as postdocs working on a groundbreaking research project with their female mentor Dr. Severin. The novel has all of the elements for a great thriller—female rivals, sexist co-workers, Shakespearean references, poison spaghetti, premenstrual psychosis, STEM—and Abbott skillfully sets up a fascinating scenario. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pay off.

Not only is the big mystery obvious and underwhelming, so is the ensuing fallout. The main problem is that Diane isn’t a worthy adversary for Kit. By the end I found myself wishing a psychopathic cheerleader would show up in the lab and liven things up a bit with a Bunsen burner. When a genre writer produces as prolifically as Abbott does, the catalog’s bound to contain a few clunkers.  Let’s hope that her next one, which I’ll no doubt buy the day it comes out, brings back the thrill I found missing in this one.

Give Me Your Hand, By Megan Abbott

(Little Brown & Company, July 17, 2018)