Hard Girls -- J. Robert Lennon, Hardcover

In this "racing, twisty crime novel," two estranged twin sisters hunt down their elusive mother--and face down the darkness they tried to escape. (Chelsea Bieker)

Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law, ) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her past: her mercurial, absent mother, her parents' secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life.

When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth's distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother's subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she's made for the one that has been impossible to escape.

Set in both the Pool family's past and their present, and melding elements of a chase novel, an espionage thriller, and domestic suspense, Hard Girls is an utterly distinctive pastiche--propulsive, mysterious, cracked, intelligent, and unexpected at every turn.


Author: J. Robert Lennon
Publisher: Mulholland Books
Published: 02/20/2024
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.00w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780316550581

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2023
Booklist 01/01/2024 pg. 24

About the Author
J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand, See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Playboy, Granta, The Paris Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere, and his criticism in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The Nation, and The London Review of Books. He lives in Ithaca, New York.