THE FAVORITE DAUGHTER

There’s nothing a little revenge can’t fix in Rouda’s (Best
Day Ever, 2017, etc.) diabolical new domestic thriller.

It’s been about a year since Jane Harris’ eldest daughter, Mary,
drowned after a fall from a high cliff into the torrential waters off the
Southern California coast, plunging Jane into a haze of grief and pills. It’s
also been hard for Jane’s husband, David, and artistic younger daughter, Betsy,
who is about to graduate from high school. Jane is ready to make her return to
the social scene of The Cove, her exclusive neighborhood, and of course as the
glue that holds her loving family together. Not so fast. “Loving family” might
be an overstatement. After two decades of marriage, Jane discovers David is
cheating (those tracker apps come in handy), and Betsy has been doing some
sneaking around of her own. Jane has also been getting anonymous notes that
indicate Mary’s accident might not have been so accidental and that Betsy might
even have had something to do with it. That’s unacceptable. Jane didn’t claw
her way up from her horrid Arkansas upbringing for nothing. No one gets away
with doing Jane wrong, and absolutely no one gets away with killing her
favorite daughter (and Jane repeatedly makes it clear that Mary was her fave).
Poor Betsy. In Jane, Rouda delivers another highly damaged and wildly
unreliable narrator who is impossible to love but equally impossible to look
away from. The utterly shameless Jane takes full advantage of people’s tendency
to underestimate her and punctuates her bad behavior with flashes of dark
humor. Readers will know they’re surely being duped but will want to find out
just how far the deeply narcissistic Jane will go to maintain her carefully
constructed veneer of humanity and bend those around her, especially her
family, to her will. And revenge is a dish best served cold.