Saltwater A novel

Hays's stellar sophomore novel (after The Cloisters) is a powerful, surprise-packed study of family, wealth, and consequences. In 1992, promising playwright Sarah Lingate--wife of the youngest heir to the Lingate oil fortune--drowned beneath the cliffs of the family's property in Capri. Her daughter, Helen, was three years old at the time. Three decades after Sarah's death, which was officially ruled an accident, the Lingates are preparing for their latest trip to Capri when Helen intercepts an anonymous package addressed to her uncle that contains a necklace Sarah was wearing the night she drowned. Before the family arrives in Capri, Helen and her friend, Lorna, who happens to be her uncle's assistant, decide to seize on the opportunity and use the necklace to blackmail the family for 10 million euros, which would allow them to break free of the Lingates' suffocating clutches. When Lorna disappears, however, it becomes clear that each member of the Lingate family has their own agenda--and that many of them are willing to go to extremes to keep the police from reinvestigating Sarah's death. Hays uses the island setting to brilliantly exploit locked-room mystery tropes, and doles out jaw-dropping reveals at just the right moments. This masterful suspense story has all the momentum of a runaway train. Agent: Sarah Phair, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Mar.)

Following up her debut, The Cloisters (a Read with Jenna Pick), Hays takes readers to the island of Capri off the coast of Italy, where the wealthy and private Lingate family return each year, despite the death of matriarch Sarah, wife of Richard, 30 years ago. Sarah's death is still a mystery: did she fall from the cliff accidentally or did she jump? Or was she pushed? For daughter Helen, those questions are a side note to plans she's made for this year's visit to the island. All her life she has been suffocated by her family's power, money, and obsession with keeping up appearances. Now, having formed a friendship and alliance with her uncle's assistant, Lorna, she thinks she's found a way out. But the plan hinges on reminding everyone of Sarah's death and threatening to expose long-buried secrets. Once the plan is in motion, they lose control of the players with deadly effect. VERDICT The tension in this atmospheric novel builds like a drumbeat as Hays explores the secrets that lie within a privileged family and keeps readers guessing from one twist to the next. For fans of Lucy Foley and Lucinda Berry.--Jane Jorgenson