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Summary
Summary
"Riveting and brilliantly structured, A Simple Favor is an edge-of-your seat domestic thriller about a missing wife and mother that relies on a rotating cast of unreliable narrators to ingeniously examine the cost of competitive mom-friends, the toll of ordinary marital discontent and the fallacy of the picture-perfect, suburban family."--Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author
She's your best friend. She knows all your secrets. That's why she's so dangerous.
A single mother's life is turned upside down when her best friend vanishes in this chilling debut thriller in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.
It starts with a simple favor--an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another. When her best friend, Emily, asks Stephanie to pick up her son Nicky after school, she happily says yes. Nicky and her son, Miles, are classmates and best friends, and the five-year-olds love being together--just like she and Emily. A widow and stay-at-home mommy blogger living in woodsy suburban Connecticut, Stephanie was lonely until she met Emily, a sophisticated PR executive whose job in Manhattan demands so much of her time.
But Emily doesn't come back. She doesn't answer calls or return texts. Stephanie knows something is terribly wrong--Emily would never leave Nicky, no matter what the police say. Terrified, she reaches out to her blog readers for help. She also reaches out to Emily's husband, the handsome, reticent Sean, offering emotional support. It's the least she can do for her best friend. Then, she and Sean receive shocking news. Emily is dead. The nightmare of her disappearance is over.
Or is it? Because soon, Stephanie will begin to see that nothing--not friendship, love, or even an ordinary favor--is as simple as it seems.
A Simple Favor is a remarkable tale of psychological suspense--a clever and twisting free-fall of a ride filled with betrayals and reversals, twists and turns, secrets and revelations, love and loyalty, murder and revenge. Darcey Bell masterfully ratchets up the tension in a taut, unsettling, and completely absorbing story that holds you in its grip until the final page. Don't miss the film version starring Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively and Henry Golding!
Author Notes
Darcey Bell is an American author and teacher. She was born in 1981 and grew up on a dairy farm in western Iowa. She teaches preschool in Chicago. A Simple Favor is her first novel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Bell's convoluted debut, widowed mommy-blogger Stephanie Ward receives a call from her best friend, Emily Nelson, asking her to pick up Emily's five-year-old son, Nicky, from school. There's an emergency at work, Emily explains, but she'll be by to get Nicky no later than 9 p.m. Nicky is best friends with Stephanie's son, Miles, and the boys attend the same suburban Connecticut kindergarten, so Stephanie agrees. Days pass and Emily never appears, leading Stephanie to fear the worst. Emily's husband, Sean, returns home from his European business trip and calls the police, who assume that Emily has simply run away-until her body washes up at her family's lake house in Michigan. Stephanie initially seeks to comfort Sean, but when questions arise surrounding Emily's death, she's left wondering what is true and whom to trust. While Stephanie, Emily, and Sean share the narrative, Stephanie is the primary point-of-view character, and her vacuity and naïveté undercut the story's tension and heft. Bell further squanders an intriguing setup with ill-defined stakes and tired, telegraphed plot twists. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An insecure woman with an edgy past insinuates herself into the lives of a narcissistic, glamorous couple and finds herself in jeopardy.The formula is familiar: Bell's debut is a pale facsimile of The Girl on the Train. True to template, the novel tells the same story from the differing and self-serving perspectives of three narrators. Stephanie is a blogger who writes about mom issues. Recently widowed and raising small son Miles alone, she overshares all manner of anxieties on her blog. Her husband and her half brother died together in a tragic auto crash, but later we learn the edgy part: her husband had suspicions about her ongoing affair with her half brother. Stephanie forms a play-date friendship with fellow Connecticut mom Emily, a busy publicist for a top Manhattan fashion designer. Certainly, Emily has an unusual fondness for serial-killer movies and Patricia Highsmith novelsand, thanks to her high-powered job, is always sticking Stephanie with the kidsbut Stephanie thinks, and blogs, that she's finally found a true friend. The two do share a common dysfunctional past: estrangement from Midwestern parents. After Emily disappears during a business trip, however, the POV shifts to her, and we learn that she and her Wall Street trader husband, Sean (who's the third narrator), planned to fake her death in order to cash in on a $2 million life insurance policy so they and their son, Nicky, could escape the rat race. From here, the typical who's-playing-whom standoff between the three principals unspools, and violence accelerates. There are plenty of rationalizations cited by Sean and Emily as to why their scam makes sense, in spite of the likelihood that $2 million is a drop in Sean's annual bonus bucket, and, in any case, how much time away from the rat race would it really buy? This is just one of many unconvincing motivations driving the plot, which will amply satisfy readers' lowest expectations. More like "girl on a train wreck." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Emily and Stephanie become best friends, despite their differences, after their five-year-old sons, Nicky and Miles, bond in kindergarten. Emily married to Sean, who works on Wall Street handles public relations for a high-style Manhattan designer, while Stephanie, a widow, is a stay-at-home mom who writes a blog for other moms. When Emily has an emergency at work, she asks Stephanie for a simple favor: to pick up Nicky at school, along with Miles, and take him home until she can get him later that evening. Except that Emily doesn't come home not that night, or the next day, or for weeks after. Sean is initially nonchalant, thinking Emily is traveling on business, until he, too, gets worried. Stephanie's blog posts, asking other moms for assistance or advice, are interspersed with chapters from the viewpoints of each of the three principal adults, as secrets are revealed, and the plot takes one twist after another to its final pages. Debut-novelist Bell ramps up suspense with authority in this domestic thriller, in which actions seem as inevitable as they are chilling. The audience that made Gone Girl a publishing sensation is likely to take to this one, too.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Widowed mommy blogger -Stephanie and Emily are good friends who met through their five-year-old sons. When Emily asks Stephanie to watch her son Nicky for several hours, she willingly agrees to the favor. Yet she becomes concerned when Emily does not return to retrieve Nicky. Stephanie's anxiety escalates with each passing day that Emily is missing. When Sean, Emily's husband, comes back from a business trip, Emily has been gone for six days. When a body is discovered that is identified as Emily's, their joint grief draws Stephanie and Sean closer. But things aren't always as they seem. Many secrets swirl around Emily's disappearance. Was she really the friend Stephanie thought she was? What life-altering skeletons in the closet are waiting to be exposed? VERDICT Bell's edgy first novel is chock-full of dirty little secrets, lies, and manipulations. Gone Girl devotees should reserve an advance copy and carve out uninterrupted time for this juicy read. [See Prepub Alert, 9/26/16; library outreach.]-Mary Todd Chesnut, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.