Woman with a Gun

The title refers to a photograph that wannabe novelist Stacy Kim espies at the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y.C. She becomes obsessed by it and discovers that back in 2005, while taking a stroll on a beach in the seacoast town of Palisades Heights, Ore., photographer Kathy Moran saw and quickly photographed a dazed gun-toting newlywed Megan Cahill, just after her wealthy and powerful new husband, Raymond, was murdered in a nearby mansion. Determined to spin a fiction based on the actual event, Stacy quits her dreary job and drives to the scene of the crime to gather more background material. But someone in Palisades Heights doesn’t want new attention drawn to this unsolved murder and is willing to kill Stacy if that’s what it takes. Reader Huber treats Margolin’s extremely tricky novel with a careful, unhurried narration that helps keep its interlocked stories on track and in focus. And as the book’s main characters go through a panoply of changes, she smartly adjusts to their shifting moods. Stacy, for example, answers the phone at her dull day job with a false perky voice that immediately becomes elated when she’s freed from her job and the big city—and she sounds even happier when she falls in love with a helpful Palisades Heights attorney, then turns terrified after discovering a corpse and receiving a series of threats. A Harper hardcover. (Dec.)