Goonight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner
A Suspenseful Novel Right Off the Bestseller's List
"Goodnight Nobody" by Jennifer Weiner, originally released in 2005 and just out in paperback, combines a "cozy" suburban heroine with a suspenseful plot.
It's the best of both genres.
The reader meets Kate Klein, a Connecticut housewife and mother of three pre-school children, on the first pages as she arrives at a neighbor and aquaintance, Kitty Cavanaugh's house for a lunch, only to find her hostess dead on her kitchen floor with a knife in her back. Stunned, Kate hustles her children away from the scene and calls the police from Kitty's house, recognizing all too well the telephone number she sees jotted down by the phone. Kate, impulsively, grabs the paper with the number and starts a series of events that will bring her close to losing all that she cares about.
Gradually, the reader learns about Kate's past life: her New York City childhood as the daughter of an opera diva and an orchestra oboe player, how she was a hopeful young editor in New York City with her best friend Janie, how she came to give birth to three children in less than a year (including one set of twins), and how she hates the suburban Connecticut lifestyle.
The reader, too, learns of Kitty's life: about her philandering husband, her secret writing career, and the troublesome missing link in her past.
As Kate, with the help of her friend Janie, digs into the circumstances surrounding Kitty's death (after all the local police aren't accustomed to that sort of thing), she comes in contact with her old flame, Evan as well as several characters who aren't at all what they seem.
Through it all, Kate is a kind of Connecticut misfit. She feeds her family frozen food; she'd rather die than try Pilates; and she habitually fifteen minutes late to pick up the kids from pre-school (a Connecticut sin).
Goodnight Nobody, Jennifer Weiner's fourth novel, climbed to number two on the New York Times bestseller list. It's a suspenseful, yet fun to read book that leaves the reader wanting more.
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