Friday, February 06, 2015

What is Jamie Mason reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jamie Mason, author of Monday's Lie.

Her entry begins:
I’m deep into Karen Abbott’s Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy and it’s every bit as good as I’d hoped it would be. Abbott is one of my favorite non-fiction writers going. I was hooked on her methods by American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life And Times of Gypsy Rose Lee. It was a book club assigned read, and I didn’t care one whit about Gypsy Rose Lee -- until about a paragraph and a half into that book.

Karen Abbott’s M.O., thus far anyway, is to take a slice of underreported history and show us what we’ve missed. The research makes it chewy, but the words make it delicious. She seems as interested in the language of her work as she is in the facts and the amazements of...[read on]
About Monday's Lie, from the publisher:
From the acclaimed author of the “ripping good” (The New York Times) debut novel Three Graves Full comes a new thriller about a woman who digs into her unconventional past to confirm what she suspects: her husband isn't what she thought he was.

Dee Aldrich rebelled against her off-center upbringing when she married the most conventional man she could imagine: Patrick, her college sweetheart. But now, years later, her marriage is falling apart and she’s starting to believe that her husband has his eye on a new life...a life without her, one way or another.

Haunted by memories of her late mother Annette, a former covert operations asset, Dee reaches back into her childhood to resurrect her mother’s lessons and the “spy games” they played together, in which Dee learned memory tricks and, most importantly, how and when to lie. But just as she begins determining the course of the future, she makes a discovery that will change her life: her mother left her a lot of money and her own husband seems to know more about it than Dee does. Now, before it’s too late, she must investigate her suspicions and untangle conspiracy from coincidence, using her mother’s advice to steer her through the blind spots. The trick, in the end, will be in deciding if a “normal life” is really what she wants at all.

With pulse-pounding prose and atmospheric settings, Monday’s Lie is a thriller that delivers more of the “Hitchcockian menace” (Peter Straub) that made Three Graves Full a critical hit. For fans of the Coen brothers or Gillian Flynn, this is a book you won’t want to miss.
Visit Jamie Mason's website.

The Page 69 Test: Monday's Lie.

My Book, The Movie: Monday's Lie.

Writers Read: Jamie Mason.

--Marshal Zeringue