Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Swiss novelist Dicker (The Alaska Sanders Affair) delivers a rollicking heist thriller centered on two couples with carefully concealed secrets. Geneva banker Arpad Braun and his attorney wife, Sophie, lead charmed lives until they invite acquaintances Greg and Karine to Arpad's 40th birthday party, where both become obsessed with Sophie. Greg lusts after her, spying on her from the woods behind her house, while Karine longs for her confidence and friendship. Greg, a senior SWAT team officer, is gunning for a promotion. As his obsession with Sophie--who has many secrets of her own--grows, he installs a police surveillance camera in the Brauns' bedroom and records Arpad agreeing to help an old friend with a major robbery. As Dicker gradually reveals Arpad's criminal past and the fraught details of his and Sophie's romance, a complex map of betrayals and hidden motives emerges that links the pair to Greg and Karine. Though the prose can be limp and the characters lack depth, the climactic heist sequence is undeniably propulsive, and Dicker maintains tension with his use of multiple timelines. This entertains. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In Dicker's newest literary thriller (following The Alaska Sanders Affair), an affluent golden couple, Arpad and Sophie, befriend their working-class neighbors Greg and Karine in Geneva, Switzerland. The four are quickly overtaken by the primitive emotions of lust, distrust, shame, and greed, culminating in a jewelry store robbery. Both Greg and Karine are drawn to the lawyer Sophie--police officer Greg lusts after her, while his shop clerk wife Karine is awed by and jealous of Sophie's seemingly perfect marriage and family. Little do they know that Sophie and her banker husband Arpad are keeping secrets from each other and their friends. A stranger from their past comes to Geneva, setting in motion events that will upend all the characters' lives. Dicker mixes social commentary in with the mystery of how his bourgeois characters are connected to the robbery that opens the novel. Although the plotting is sometimes bogged down by flashbacks, the characters are interesting, and the story thought-provoking with broad appeal. VERDICT Sure to resonate with fans of international literary thrillers such as Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies and Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap.--Jon Jeffryes
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