Hairpin Bridge

Starred review from April 26, 2021
Adams follows his debut, 2019’s No Exit, with another dazzling thriller. Cambry Nguyen, 24, was wrapping up a yearlong odyssey across America when highway patrolman Raymond Raycevic found her dead beneath Hairpin Bridge, a derelict structure off a now-closed road 60 miles from Missoula, Mont. Unconvinced by the verdict of suicide, Cambry’s identical twin, Lena, drives from her home in Seattle to Montana. Raycevic reluctantly leads Lena to the bridge and begins to answer her increasingly pointed questions. Was it coincidence that Raycevic pulled Cambry over for speeding only an hour before her death? Why did her last text to Lena read “Please Forgive Me. I couldn’t live with it. Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic?” Though Lena, who believes Raycevic murdered her sister, tells Raycevic that she wants revenge as well as answers, he assumes the small minimum-wage electronics store worker poses little threat. Instead, she’s a superb marksman prepared for every eventuality. Skillfully entwined third-person narrative, posts from Lena’s blog, and passages from the book she’s writing about Cambry reveal the sisters’ past and Cambry’s final hours. Adams is a writer to watch. Agent: David Hale Smith, InkWell Management.

January 1, 2021

In When Justice Sleeps, Abrams takes a break from her considerable political responsibilities to craft a legal thriller featuring Avery Keene, who clerks for Supreme Court Justice Wynn and takes over the background investigation of a key case when he falls into a coma. In Hairpin Bridge, Adams's No Exit follow-up, Lena Nguyen doesn't believe that estranged twin sister Cambry committed suicide; otherwise, she likely wouldn't have called 911 16 times before her death (100,000-copy first printing). In Hummel's Lesson in Red, follow-up to the Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick Still Lives, Maggie Richter faces another artworld mystery. In Edgar-nominated, New York Times best-selling author McCreight's Friends Like These, a bachelor party in the Catskills is a cover for a staged intervention to help one of the guests, but someone ends up dead (75,000-copy first printing). Abducted from her found-religion parents' isolated Arkansas homestead and returned unharmed yet still treated as damaged, teenage Sarabeth gladly makes her exit, but in International Thriller Writer Award winner McHugh's What's Done in Darkness, she gets called back five years later to help with a copycat crime. Following Mangin's nationally best-selling Tangerine, Palace of the Drowned stars flailing British novelist Frankie Croy, who is staying in a friend's vacant Venice palazzo in 1966 while struggling to regain her early writing promise and doesn't quite trust a fan who comes her way (200,000-copy first printing). Having had a huge international best seller with The Silent Patient, Michaelides aims for another winner in his Untitled new work (one-million-copy first printing). Following the New York Times best-selling, Reese Witherspoon-optioned Something in the Water, Steadman returns with The Disappearing Act, about a British actress who realizes that she's the only witness to the disappearance of a woman she auditioned with during Hollywood's harried pilot season.

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June 1, 2021
Adams' gripping psychological thriller is haunting, disturbing, stomach-churning, and violent. Cambry Nguyen's loved ones are devastated when they learn she has killed herself by jumping off a deserted bridge in the middle of nowhere, far from home. They can't reconcile the rebellious, free-spirited young woman who lived life on her own terms with someone who would commit suicide. Her identical twin, Lena, refuses to believe that Cambry killed herself and travels to rural Montana, where Cambry died, to meet the cop who found her body, hoping he can shed light on what led her sister to such a dark end. As layer after layer of this stunningly crafted story are peeled back, readers will be shocked by the devastating twists. No one is what they seem; what appears to be true is often false. This is a strange and powerful tale of justice, mercy, revenge, and regret, with a dramatic and unexpected ending. A must-read for genre fans and those looking for a unique, if troubling, read.

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