Dear Mr. M : a novel /

Trust no one. Certainly not the narrators this story is told from alternating points of view and perhaps not even yourself. Koch's totally engrossing blend of thriller and literary fiction will take you into that Twilight Zone middle ground between light and shadow and hold you there for awhile afterward. There is much examination of the writing process, artistic license, and literary merit built into the story of a writer whose greatest success came with a thriller based on a real-life disappearance. The author known to us merely as M now finds his career in decline, and he seems to have become the obsession of his bizarre downstairs neighbor. You have to really like this kind of thing it is not the kind of story that you can read on and off. It requires your complete attention, but when you give it, you will be absorbed by the clever prose. Based on the phenomenal success of the Amsterdam author's previous novels, especially The Dinner (2013), Dear Mr. M is bound to find a strong audience, especially amongfans of Lionel Shriver and Megan Abbott.--Murphy, Jane Copyright 2016 Booklist

The Dutch author of The Dinner keeps the reader pleasantly off balance in a tale about a fading novelist and the crime that inspired the book that brought him fame. At first, the aging Mr. M, who lives with his "lovely, young" and "self-effacing" wife and three-year-old daughter, is observed only through the cool eyes of his younger downstairs neighbor, whom M consistently fails to recognize outside of the apartment building. Later, the misanthropic M gets his own chapters in the spotlight as he considers disposing of the middle-aged housewives attending a library book-signing or engages in fisticuffs with a rival at an authors' dinner. Other characters taking their moment in the spotlight include M's wife, Ana, and the two young inspirations for M's novel, Herman and Laura, who may or may not have done away with their high school history teacher. All have motives and feelings that are more twisted than one first suspects. Koch cleverly lays out the pieces of his puzzle, letting first one pattern and then another emerge, and leaving the final piece in reserve until the last few pages. His sardonic sense of humor and dark perspective on human failings give the novel a greater, more satisfying depth than the usual thriller. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.