Don’t You Cry

An autumnal chill, as piercing as the wind off Lake Michigan, pervades this muted psychological chamber piece from Kubica (Pretty Baby). The story unspools, initially slowly, through two alternating narrators: Quinn, a young Chicago woman whose exemplary roommate, Esther, has gone missing, apparently out the fire escape of their apartment, and 18-year-old Alex, who turned down a full college scholarship to stay in his poky hometown on the shore of Lake Michigan an hour outside Chicago to care for his alcoholic father. As Quinn starts to discover that there seems to be a lot about Esther that she didn’t know—some of it downright scary—and Alex befriends a pretty but peculiar stranger he nicknames Pearl, the dual accounts begin to ping off each other. Although the pace accelerates in the final third as the plot speeds toward a shocking if contrived climax, the book as a whole boasts nowhere near the urgency or impact of Kubica’s white-knuckle debut, The Good Girl. Author tour. Agent: Rachael Dillon Fried, Greenburger Associates. (May)