Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - 5:00pm
A Breakout Thriller from a Sharp New Talent Maureen
Coughlin is in a rut. At twenty-nine, the strong Staten Island native
fears she may become a “lifer” at the Narrows, the faux-swank bar where
she waits tables five nights a week. Nursing a strained relationship
with her mother, she tries to find ambition in the little things—a gym
membership, a plan to return to school, a dash of cocaine before
work—but there’s no denying that she’s stuck. Then, leaving work one
night, Maureen walks in on a tryst between her coworker Dennis and Frank
Sebastian, a silver-haired aspiring politician. Fearing repercussions,
Sebastian forces her into silence, and Maureen is more than happy to
forget what she’s seen—until Dennis turns up dead on the train tracks
the next morning. In her search for answers, Maureen finds new meaning
in her life. But before she can track down Sebastian, he tracks down her
mother. Soon Maureen is bouncing from one corner of Staten Island to
the other, trying to protect her mother while staying one step ahead of
Sebastian. With The Devil She Knows, Bill Loehfelm has written a
pitchblack thriller that evokes the grit of Dennis Lehane in a fresh,
compulsively readable voice, with a heroine every inch as tough as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander. This is a breakout novel by a writer whom Publishers Weekly has praised for his “superb prose and psychological insights.”
Event address:
160 Courthouse Sq
38655-3914 Oxford
us