Poison

September 18, 2017
In Niederhoffer’s engrossing fourth novel (after Love and Happiness), a journalism professor’s area of expertise becomes all too relevant when she starts to think her husband is trying to kill her. After Cass Phillips, a 40-year-old widowed mother of two, remarries Ryan, they relocate for a change of pace from New York to Madrona, a suburb of Seattle where Cass knows no one except for Nora, who sells them their new house. Cass teaches journalism at a local university, where she breaks down how prosecutors use institutional misogyny to destroy the accounts of female witnesses. Parallels begin to appear between the hypothetical victims in Cass’s lessons and her deteriorating relationship with Ryan—he gaslights her, verbally abuses her, and issues veiled threats. Niederhoffer handles this aspect of the narrative expertly: Cass finds hair that doesn’t belong to her in the drain and other signs (Ryan keeps buying her foods with high arsenic content) and, along with Nora, attempts to implicate Ryan without losing custody of her toddler, Sam. Though quite the page-turner, the story falters in its last act with a clunky ruse that Cass springs in hopes of nabbing Ryan. It also ends abruptly for a book that is otherwise meticulous in its explanations and details. Nevertheless, this is a chilling and entertaining novel.