A Simple Favor

January 9, 2017
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.

February 15, 2017

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2016

Widowed mommy blogger Stephanie gladly helps Emily by picking up her five-year-old son, Nicky, at school. After all, she and Emily are best friends, as are their two sons. But Emily doesn't show up at Stephanie's to get Nicky at day's end. One big debut, with a 100,000-copy first printing, rights sold to 24 countries and territories, and film rights preempted by Fox 2000.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2017
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 novels--and, thanks to her high-powered job, is always sticking Stephanie with the kids--but 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."

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Starred review from February 1, 2017
Emily and Stephanie become best friends, despite their differences, after their five-year-old sons, Nicky and Miles, bond in kindergarten. Emilymarried to Sean, who works on Wall Streethandles 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 homenot 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)