Better Sister (eBook)

Alafair Burke (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-34556-4 (ISBN)

Infos

NOW A PRIME VIDEO TV SERIES STARRING ELIZABETH BANKS AND JESSICA BIEL 'Highly addictive' KARIN SLAUGHTER 'A major talent' HARLAN COBEN 'Accomplished and absorbing' SUNDAY TIMES Keep your enemies close and your sister closer. . . For a while, it seemed like both Taylor sisters had found happiness. Chloe landed a coveted publishing job in New York City. Nicky got married to a promising young attorney named Adam McIntosh and became a mother to a baby boy named Ethan. But now, fourteen years later, it is Chloe who is married to Adam. When he is murdered at the couple's beach house, she has no choice but to welcome her estranged sister - her teenage stepson's biological mother - back into her life. When the police begin to treat Ethan as a suspect, the sisters are forced to confront the truth behind family secrets they both tried to leave behind in order to protect the boy they love, whatever the cost. Readers were gripped by The Better Sister: 'Reading an Alafair Burke novel is like a ride on a Harley.' ????? 'If writing twists and turns were an Olympic sport, Alafair Burke would be the gold medal champion.' ????? 'This is one of the best domestic thrillers I have ever read.' ????? 'An excellent read with a twisty, 'I did not see that coming!' ending!' ????? 'This book kept me on my toes trying to figure out who did it. It was a real page turner.' ????? 'A must read for crime novel fans.'?????

Alafair Burke is the Edgar-nominated, New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels of suspense, including Find Me, The Ex, The Wife,The Better Sister, and the co-author of the best-selling 'Under Suspicion' series with Mary Higgins Clark. The Better Sister is being adapted for television by Amazon Prime, and will star Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks. A former prosecutor, and now a professor of criminal law, she recently served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded the prestigious Pinckley Prize in 2023. She lives in New York.

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NOW A PRIME VIDEO TV SERIES STARRING ELIZABETH BANKS AND JESSICA BIEL'Highly addictive' KARIN SLAUGHTER'A major talent' HARLAN COBEN'Accomplished and absorbing' SUNDAY TIMESKeep your enemies close and your sister closer. . . For a while, it seemed like both Taylor sisters had found happiness. Chloe landed a coveted publishing job in New York City. Nicky got married to a promising young attorney named Adam McIntosh and became a mother to a baby boy named Ethan. But now, fourteen years later, it is Chloe who is married to Adam. When he is murdered at the couple's beach house, she has no choice but to welcome her estranged sister - her teenage stepson's biological mother - back into her life. When the police begin to treat Ethan as a suspect, the sisters are forced to confront the truth behind family secrets they both tried to leave behind in order to protect the boy they love, whatever the cost. Readers were gripped by The Better Sister:'Reading an Alafair Burke novel is like a ride on a Harley.' ?????'If writing twists and turns were an Olympic sport, Alafair Burke would be the gold medal champion.' ?????'This is one of the best domestic thrillers I have ever read.' ?????'An excellent read with a twisty, "e;I did not see that coming!"e; ending!' ?????'This book kept me on my toes trying to figure out who did it. It was a real page turner.' ?????'A must read for crime novel fans.'?????

Rezensionen

With Burke you know you're in good hands.

A woman marrying her older sister's ex-husband is a pretty neat set-up for any story. Chuck in the murder of said husband and the stepson emerging as a suspect and you have a cracker of a plot. Burke's portrayal of the complex relationship between the two siblings, with their shared secrets but very different outlooks, that makes this book such a compelling read.

This twisting domestic thriller shows that Burke is now a mistress of the genre and particularly adept with sibling relationships and the strange tensions they trail in their wake. a fast and rewarding read.

In the style of Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay ... Burke knows how to keep her readers guessing.

An absorbing novel.

[An] interesting cross between domestic noir and legal thriller. Burke handles the secrets and revelations well and keeps the tension high until the last page.

Another classy slice of psychological drama from Alafair Burke.

Everything a great mystery should be - intriguing, suspenseful, compelling, insightful, surprising, and thoroughly satisfying. A great read.

Gripping ... Fresh and timely.

Domestic noir doesn't come much more noirish.

You know just from the title that this is going to be a winner; you also know it's a 'must read' from the simple fact that Alafair Burke is the author... From word one, Burke has created a nonstop thriller fest.,

I absolutely love Alafair Burke - she's one of my favourite authors - I know it's summer when I have one of her books in my hand.

A highly accomplished and absorbing blend of psychological and courtroom thriller.

Textauszug

1

Fourteen Years Later

THE BACK OF Café Loup was dark and cool, so every time the restaurant door opened to the sun and humidity outside, I found myself craning my neck to look for Adam. He hadn’t promised to join us, but I knew that the entertainment reporter conducting the interview was “dying to meet the man behind the woman.”

Unfortunately, I had made the mistake of telling Adam about her expectations. If I had kept that piece of information to myself, I could have lied and told her that my husband had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t make it. But instead I had set myself up for uncertainty and therefore disappointment, and was now waiting anxiously to see if he would put in an appearance.

I forced myself to focus my attention where it belonged.

The interviewer was named Colby and was probably twenty-five years old, around the same age I was when I first landed a journalism job in New York City. The landscape had changed dramatically in the interim. When I started at City Woman, we boasted an average monthly circulation of nearly three hundred thousand copies, and a staff that occupied a full floor of a prestigious midtown high-rise. Eve was one of the last women’s magazines standing, but we were struggling to crack a hundred thousand print readers a month.

These days, most publishers were putting the “free” in “freelance.” Given the changes in the market, my guess is that young, eager Colby had twice the résumé I’d compiled at her age, yet was happy to have landed her full-time gig with a web-only e-zine aimed at millennial women.

We were finished with introductions, and I could tell when she looked down at her notes that we were moving on to her prepared questions.

“By the time you were named editor in chief at Eve, the industry had all but written the magazine’s obituary. But you worked a complete turnaround—ramping up online readership, adding more politics and less fluff—and now Eve is one of the last remaining successful feminist-oriented magazines in the country. Now you’re on the eve—no pun intended—of receiving the vaunted Press for the People Award for your influential Them Too series. Does this moment feel like the culmination of your entire life’s work?”

I knew my answer would make me sound sad and tired to Colby and her peers, but I told myself that at least it was authentic. “The culmination of my life’s work? I certainly hope not. That kind of talk makes me feel like I’m being put out to pasture.”

She hit the pause button on her iPhone and began apologizing profusely. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. You’re like my idol. That’s not what I meant at all.”

I hit the record button again and told her that she should never apologize for a question, and then gave her a sound-bite she could use.

“I feel guilty taking credit for any of it,” I said. “The real heroes are the women who told their own stories first. The Me Too movement made women begin to feel safe speaking out. We all knew such conduct was repugnant—and rampant—but we were always taught to tough it out. Don’t rock the boat. Smile and make it to the next day. But then women found power in the collective, and powerful men learned that there could be consequences to their actions, even if delayed, even without police and courtrooms. That was the starting point for everything, so, really, my work was just following the lead of all those other women, and the journalists who helped tell their stories.”

The work she was asking me about was a series of features covering an initiative I launched at Eve. On the heels of the Me Too movement, I wrote an opinion piece exploring my concern that the movement’s seismic cultural shift would be confined to high-profile, celebrity-driven workplaces. After the initial takedowns of predators who had committed heinous acts for years, the movement’s influence had seeped into a discussion of lesser offenses by other famous men. But would it affect the workplaces of women employed by bosses we had never heard of? What about the women who worked in factories and on sales floors? What about waitresses and bartenders who were beholden to managers for the busiest shifts, and to customers for tips? To help spotlight their stories, I paired “everyday” women suffering sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace with a better-known Me Too groundbreaker. I personally wrote the articles tracing the commonalities in their stories and the impact of the resulting friendships. In a twist on the now-famous hashtag, I had dubbed the effort Them Too.

What I began as an experiment blossomed in ways I never predicted. An A-list actress who was among the first to come forward about an abusive director brought her “them-too sister” as her date to the Academy Awards. The host of one of the network morning shows was now godmother to her match’s newborn daughter. And, most important to me, seven Fortune 500 corporations had fired high-level executives and implemented corporate-wide policy changes as a result of the series, all because women had used their celebrity—and I had used my magazine—as a way to bring attention to the narratives of women who believed they had no voice.

Although I tried to focus on the women who had participated in the series, Colby of course wanted to hear all the crap I had put up with over the course of my own career.

We were on the topic of the second man who had offered me a job in exchange for sex when the restaurant door opened again. By then, I was deep into the story and had assumed that Colby and I would be alone for the rest of our meeting. Adam was well past the bar, almost to our table, by the time I spotted him in my periphery.

“Oh my goodness, what a surprise,” I said, rising to greet him with a hug. “I can’t remember the last time we were together before five o’clock on a weekday.”

I noticed Colby sizing him up, surprised at his youthful appearance, as many people were when first meeting him. Adam was six years older than I am, making him forty-seven, but I joked that he’d stopped aging about a decade ago. He was seemingly genetically incapable of either hair loss or weight gain.

Phillip, our waiter, appeared instantly. “Oh, there he is. The handsome husband I was hoping to see.” Our apartment was three blocks from Café Loup. We’d been regulars for years.

As Adam ordered a slightly dirty martini, Colby asked me if I was used to Adam being welcomed so enthusiastically. “So annoying,” I said with mock resentment. “I kid you not: there’s not a person on this planet who would say a bad word about him.”

“Tell that to Tommy Farber,” Adam said, reaching for my wineglass. He took a sip of my cabernet, wrinkled his nose, and handed the glass back to me. “Kid beat my ass every Friday afternoon for two years. I think I still have creases on my forehead from the locker door.”

“How’d the two of you meet?” Colby asked.

I hated that question, but had the usual highly edited response ready to roll. “We knew each other back in Cleveland where we grew up, but reconnected when he moved to New York for work.”

I was relieved when Colby seemed satisfied with the answer and went on to ask Adam what it was like to be a successful man married to an even more successful woman. I found myself envying—and resenting—the complete absence of discomfort or apology in her question. She wasn’t in the habit (yet, at least) of protecting a man’s ego.

As Adam spoke, I enjoyed playing a role I rarely got to occupy. I beamed as he told Colby how proud he had been of my every achievement: starting out as an assistant and then making it as a writer for City Woman, editor in chief at that little downtown-focused rag, my first essay in the New Yorker, my photo shoot three years before for Cosmo’s “40 Under 40” feature.

I grew up with parents who didn’t even notice when I earned a blue ribbon in … anything. It was so like Adam to have a running list of my achievements at his fingertips. How many times had I been told how lucky I was to have a husband who was so unabashedly proud of his wife? As if there was something unnatural about it.

*

WE HELD HANDS AS WE made the short walk back to our apartment on Twelfth Street. “Thank you so much for doing that, Adam. If Colby has a boyfriend, I have a feeling he’s going to be a little confused about why she seems so disappointed in him tonight. You were absolutely charming.”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and winked.

At home, I automatically found myself rewarding him for supporting me, pouring a shot of sambuca from the bar cart in the living room.

He downed the drink in one gulp and grabbed my hands as I was wrapping them around his waist. “Were you happy with the interview?” He entwined his fingers in mine before placing my hands at the base of his neck and looking into my eyes. Then he was kissing that spot beneath my right ear, his go-to move when he had other plans for us. “I swear, that interviewer looked at you like you were Gandhi.”

Adam and I hadn’t been intimate in weeks. We’d both been so busy. All I wanted was to crawl into bed with a novel. “Did you...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.4.2019
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: alafaire burke • amazon original series • attica locke • betrayal • crime and mystery • Laura Lippman • Mary Higgins Clarke, 'Under Suspicion' series • Michael Connelly • Michael Connelly, Karin Slaughter, Paula Hawkins, Gillian Flynn • Sisters • Tana French • The Ex • The Wife • The Wife, The Ex, The Girl She Was, Find Me
• ISBN-10: 0-571-34556-5 / 0571345565
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-34556-4 / 9780571345564