Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Books: "The Better Sister" By Alafair Burke





The Better Sister
By Alafair Burke
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers; 336 pages; hardcover, $26.99; available Tuesday, April 16

Alafair Burke is a New York Times bestselling author whose acclaimed novels include The Wife, which is under production for a feature film, and The Ex, which was nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel. She also is a co-author of the bestselling Under Suspicion Series with Mary Higgins Clark. A former prosecutor, Alafair now teaches criminal law and lives in Manhattan and East Hampton.


In her new book, The Better Sister, Burke presents a more high-octane premise than her prior works. 

The story centers on two estranged sisters who have been married to the same man, and they must join forces to save the teenaged boy accused of murdering him.

The family dynamics are more complex than the premise suggests, as their reunion threatens to unearth secrets they both tried to leave in the past.

Chloe Taylor is the younger of the two sisters and she is the editor in chief of a women's magazine called Eve. The life she has with her high-powered attorney husband, Adam, seems picture perfect. They have homes in Manhattan and East Hampton, and Chloe's teenage stepson, Ethan, lives with them. Chloe and Adam both seem in love and in lust with each other.

Although she has tried to feature stories that empower women, Chloe has been the subject of social media attacks. Balancing a career and a family life has not come easy to her, and we learn that her household is not all that it seems.

Nicky Taylor, the sister Chloe barely contacts, is biological mother to Chloe's stepson. Nicky was always restless, the opposite of her ambitious little sister. She floated from job to job and man to man and stayed close to home in Cleveland.

When Nicky married promising young attorney Adam and gave birth to a baby boy, it seemed like her life changed for the better. Instead, her drug and alcohol use reared their ugly heads when Ethan was a baby, and her recklessness cost her her marriage to Adam and custody of Ethan.

Now, it is more than fifteen years later and Adam has been murdered in the couple's East Hampton beach house. Chloe reluctantly allows Nicky back into her life at this time.

It's when the police begin to treat Ethan as a suspect in his father's death that the sisters unite and are forced to confront the truth behind family secrets they have tried to bury in the past.

The Better Sister is one of the most suspenseful books you will ever read and you won't be able to put it down.

Here is our review of Alafair's book The Wife, which was released in 2018: http://www.brooklyndigest.org/2018/02/books-wife-by-alafair-burke.html

Alafair Burke Events For The Better Sister:

Wednesday, April 24 at 7:00 P.M. - New York, NY - Barnes & Noble Booksellers - Upper East Side location - 150 East 86th Street, New York, NY 10128, (212)369-2180

Wednesday, May 8 at 7:00 P.M. - Avon, CT - Avon Free Public Library, 281 Country Club Rd, Avon, CT 06001, (860)673-9712

Thursday, May 9 at 1:00 P.M. - Fairfield, CT - Fairfield University Bookstore - 1499 Post Rd, Fairfield, CT 06824, (203)255-7756 - Lunch, talk, and signing

Thursday, May 9 at 7:00 P.M. - Princeton, NJ - Princeton Public Library - 65 Witherspoon St., Princeton, NJ 08542, (609)924-9529, https://princetonlibrary.org

Saturday, June 1 at 2:45 P.M. - New York, NY - BookCon 2019, Jacob Javits Center - Alafair Burke will be part of the "Page to Screen" Panel with Eoin Coffer and Nicola Yoon

Saturday, August 3 at 4:00 P.M. - Bookhampton - 41 Main St., East Hampton, NY 11937 - Alafair Burke will be part of a Panel with Laura Lippman and Alison Gaylin

No comments:

Post a Comment