Set amid politics and high society in D.C., new novel keeps you guessing
The “Beltway Basher,” a local serial killer, has just struck again, and Reven Lynch, the narrator of novelist Jane Stanton Hitchcock’s briskly entertaining “Mortal Friends,” is (guiltily) agog. “I must admit I was fascinated by these current crimes,” says Reven, a fortysomething divorcee about town—in this case, Georgetown.
A decorator turned proprietor of a fashionable antiques shop, Reven is pretty, blond (with a little help), well-connected (her best friend, Violet, is the wife of a banking heir) and full of easy, breezy small talk. About her unusual first name: It’s “never” spelled backward. “I was basically a mistake,” she tells people. “My parents never thought they’d have me.”
Actually, Reven’s got the never thing down pat. She never pays her bills on time, can never keep a secret, never looks much below the surface, never makes smart choices about men. Her romances tend to follow a pattern: “a whoosh of enthusiasm followed either by a fast puncture or a slow deflation.”
Book Details
Mortal Friends
By Jane Stanton Hitchcock
Harper, 334 pages, $25.99
She is drawn into the Beltway Basher case when an inscrutable detective, convinced that the perp is a Washington bigwig, solicits her aid in traversing the rough terrain known as high society. It “had always been a question in my mind,” Reven muses early in the novel, as she edges into the murder investigation. “Would I recognize evil if it came close?” Hint: It’s going to come close, really, really close. More
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