Seems Perfect

Hanover (The Last Applicant) delivers a limp tale of psychological manipulation set in San Francisco’s sleepy Noe Valley neighborhood. A knee injury has halted sidelined yoga teacher Emily Hawthorne. To pay her mounting bills, she advertises for a roommate to share her one-bedroom house. Charmed by a cursory online chat with a woman named Pip Stone, Emily accepts her application, but when Pip arrives, she unexpectedly has her 12-year-old daughter, Sophie, in tow. Within days, the new tenants have taken over Emily’s bedroom, rearranged the contents of her cabinets, and raided her closet; they have not, however, paid a dime in rent. Then a neighbor is murdered, and insecure Emily finds herself even more unwilling to confront her squatters. Hanover makes the regrettable choice to shunt the murder investigation to the back burner, instead dedicating far too much space to Emily’s hand-wringing and a series of repetitive stalemates between her and the two-dimensional Pip. When the pace finally picks up in the book’s final third, it’s too little, too late. This is a letdown. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders and Assoc. (Feb.)