POP CULTURE BOOKS
The Hand That Feeds You, by A.J. Rich (Scribner, 273 pages) Statistically speaking, your cat is more likely to eat you than your dog if you die alone in an apartment and aren’t found for a couple of weeks. Just file that away. Then open The Hand That Feeds You, the psychological thriller by A.J. Rich, who isn’t A.J. Rich at all, but two accomplished writers abandoning their genres to write a novel as a memorial to a friend. The result is a mesmerizing who-dun-it with both human and canine victims, the perfect summer read for a nation of people vacationing with their dogs. Morgan Prager is 30 and engaged, a student of forensic psychology at Manhattan’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In the opening pages, she comes home to her Brooklyn apartment to find her fiancé dead on the bedroom floor, and her three beloved dogs smeared with blood. Like any reasonable person, Morgan locks herself in the bathroom, crouches in the tub, and calls 911 in paralyzed terror. When the police arrive, they shoot one of her dogs, a pit bull rescue, and confiscate the other two as evidence. Morgan checks into Bellevue, the famed psychiatric hospital, where she begins both her arduous journey and that of the reader: figuring out what the hell just happened here. The police think they know. They quickly conclude that the fiancé, Bennett, who never liked the dogs anyway, somehow pro-
voked one of Morgan’s “pitties” and their sidekick, an adorable Great Pyrenees named Cloud, and the dogs ferociously attacked as a pack. The survivors, Cloud and the second pit bull, George, are dispatched to a wretched animal shelter, awaiting a temperament trial, and Morgan reluctantly tries to accept their upcoming fate and her new fiancé-less life, all the while coping with the guilt as the dogs’ owner. When investigators try to locate Bennett’s parents, however, they can’t find them. Nor can they find a birth certificate in the town where he said he had been born. Confronted with evidence that Bennett wasn’t who he told her he was, Morgan begins to remember things about their relationship that she had willfully overlooked: his refusal to meet her brother and friends, his preference to take her to bed-and-breakfasts in Maine rather than to his own house. She must also confront a rather large elephant in the room: that she had met Bennett in an unconventional way. As part of her research on victim psychology, she had set up five fake profiles on dating sites to analyze what kind of men responded. Bennett’s email to a fake account had been so normal and engaging that she had placed him in control group of “regular guys” and had later let down her guard enough to meet him. After Bennett’s death, Morgan returns to the Internet, this time to an online community of women who’ve been done wrong by their men: Lovefraud.com. There, she finds
other women who have been courted in eerily similar ways (those B&Bs in Maine are apparently thriving). After she connects with them, they start to die. This is the point at which The Hand That Feeds You becomes pure fiction. Until this point, it was, dismayingly, based on fact. The authors, Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment, were good friends with a woman who, like Morgan, was almost wed to a lie. Katherine Russell Rich, to whom the book is dedicated, was engaged to man who lied to her about almost everything in his life. She uncovered the deception, called off the wedding, and to cope, started writing her story, Hempel and Ciment told The New York Times. But before she got far, Rich died of breast cancer. In her honor, and to help deal with her loss, the friends thrashed out this novel, satisfyingly killing the reallife reprobate in its first pages. (A real-life public outing of this creep would be even more satisfying. But for now, fiction will do.) Charged with emotion like that, The Hand That Feeds You should be more poignant than it is. But the authors employ a taut, shell-shocked narrative voice — we don’t know Morgan before she saw what she can never forget — and in the first person, it could be no other way. The recently traumatized don’t rhapsodize; they endure. Morgan marches stoically along a dark path – detouring once for a jarring incident of her past, a violent deflowering – toward a conclusion that is never foreshadowed. No spoilers here. But if you’re looking for a book to put you out of your own misery for a while by depositing you forcefully into the misery of another, here it is. And just kidding about your cat. It probably won’t eat you for, oh, two or three days. B+ — Jennifer Graham
CHILDREN’S ROOM A weekly recommendation from the Concord Public Library
The Beach Book by Fiona Danks and Jo Schofield, 2015 (Non-fiction, ages 4-12)
Lessons from Tara: Life Advice from the World’s Most Brilliant Dog By David Rosenfelt
Leave the Cooking to us! Made From Scratch soups, Decadent Home Made Desserts, Full Menu with Daily Specials.
Live Music Friday July 17 th
Travis Colby (Piano Favorites) Saturday, July 18th Red Sky Mary (Rock and Roll) Sunday, July 19th
Blues Jam Special Guest Roxanne & The Voodoo Rockers
Roundtrip Poker Run 3rd. Annual Pay it Forward- Pay it Back Bike Run Bar Open 9:00am Kick Stands Up at 11:00am
SUN. AUG. 9th. $20.00 Rider/$10.00 Passenger Includes Continental Breakfast and Lunch on the Road
Taverntainment
Hits shelves: July 21
Texas Hold Em’ League
Author best known for: The Andy Carpenter series featuring Tara, the golden retriever sidekick
2 Games Nightly 6:30 and 8:30
One-sentence review: “Spirited and absolutely absorbing reading for fans of canine capers, both fictional and otherwise.” — Booklist
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Bike Night
Wednesday, 6 - Close
Bud Bucket Special • $5 French Bread Pizza
25 Main St. Goffstown Village • villagetrestle.com • 497-8230 093266 HIPPO | JULY 16 - 22, 2015 | PAGE 49