Truly Madly Guilty

An Amazon Best Book of August 2016: Many writers have trouble plumbing the depths of a single character’s soul. Moriarty effortlessly dives deep in six different characters—the three married couples at a backyard barbeque in Sydney that goes horribly wrong. Chapters jump in time between the day of the barbecue and its aftereffects in the present, with the ripples of that evening disrupting and destroying relationships. The exact nature of the shock isn’t revealed until midway through the novel, and I admit, I kept thinking to myself, “Given the buildup, this better be a wonderfully awful revelation.” Moriarty comes through, fitting the seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces together into a tight and harrowing picture. She even wraps up a long-ago tragedy that befell a crotchety neighbor in what is perhaps a too-neat moment that adds an unnecessary bow on top. While it would do the book a disservice to call it “light,” it’s so briskly paced that the pages flash by, aiming the reader, ultimately, toward a gleam of hope at the end. --Adrian Liang, The Amazon Book Review