There’s some heavy subtext in the air when five guests arrive for a weekend at THE HITCHCOCK HOTEL (Berkley, 340 pp., $29), a New England inn stuffed with movie artifacts and presided over by their former college classmate Alfred Smettle. The group has seen little of each other since graduation 16 years earlier, in part because of a terrible series of events surrounding the film studies class they took together.
Seething with years of built-up resentment, Alfred has orchestrated the weekend as if he’s producing a twisted movie. “Only the best for my former best friends,” he thinks ominously, as he sets up the scene. At the welcome dinner, he unsettles everyone with his disquieting demeanor. “If you had to commit the perfect murder, how would you do it?” he asks.
This is the third book by the talented Stephanie Wrobel, and here she skips back and forth in time and perspective. Fans of Hitchcock will appreciate the many allusions to his work: a creepy servant modeled on Mrs. Danvers in “Rebecca”; a murder of crows straight out of “The Birds”; a “Psycho”-esque dead mother, mercifully offstage.
At first, the story seems to run along a familiar bullied-student-seeks-revenge-years-later track. But it takes some unexpectedly pleasing, if loopy, detours. It turns out that Alfred, for all his scheming, isn’t the only one with a hidden agenda.
Rob Jacobson, a powerhouse Washington litigator, has been a close friend of Jack Cutler, until recently the president of the United States, since their school days in Brooklyn. As Lawrence Robbins’s courtroom drama begins, Jacobson takes on an explosive case: defending Cutler from charges of murdering a beautiful young lawyer who worked for him at the White House and with whom, you guessed it, he was having an affair.
But Jacobson’s decision to become THE PRESIDENT’S LAWYER (Atria, 312 pp., $28.99) is full of complications, many dating back to his shared history with Cutler. It doesn’t help that the victim, the brilliant and bewitching Amanda Harper, was Jacobson’s girlfriend before she was the president’s. (Admirers of “Presumed Innocent,” the platonic ideal of a legal thriller, will recognize in Harper the specter of Carolyn Polhemus, similarly gorgeous and similarly murdered.)
“I wanted to occupy center stage,” Jacobson, who narrates the book, tells us by way of explaining why he’s agreed to represent Cutler in this quixotic endeavor. “I wanted the press attention. I wanted my old friend to depend on me in his hour of greatest need. I wanted to defend the former president of the United States, even if he’d murdered the woman I loved.”
Robbins, a lawyer making his first foray into fiction at age 72, keeps the pace fast and the courtroom scenes convincing. He goes light on the politics, but imagines that the new president is a Trumpy demagogue who has won back the White House for a second term after being defeated by Cutler four years earlier. (He has his own right-wing media empire and has pardoned himself for whatever crimes he was convicted of while out of office.)
But that’s all offstage. As you read about the friendship between the ex-president and his attorney, pay attention to the details — including the ones that are missing.
“I’m not hysterical,” Iðunn, the main character in Hildur Knútsdóttir’s creepy novella THE NIGHT GUEST (Tor Nightfire, 194 pp., $19.99) tells her reflection in the mirror, cracking a strange, malicious grin. Chronically exhausted but unable to find answers from the many doctors and friends she’s consulted in Reykjavik, where she lives, she’s being bombarded with advice: take Vitamin D, try spirulina, get more exercise, cut out caffeine, relax, talk to a psychiatrist, use essential oils, “eat some meat.”
Then one morning, her new step-counting watch tells her that she’s walked more than 17 miles in her sleep. On other mornings, she finds inexplicable bruises, blood on her face, a black eye, cuts across her ankle. It’s clear she’s been sleepwalking, but where has she been going? When she puts a lock on her door, she wakes up the next morning to find that she’s torn it off its frame, in the process loosening three of her fingernails and ripping out one completely.
It’s frightening to sit by and watch someone unravel, which is essentially what you do when you read this book. Your heart goes out to Iðunn when she can’t remember what happened on a date, only that she went to bed with a man but woke up by herself. “Leave me alone, or I’ll call the police,” he finally texts. Even more creepily, the once-friendly cats in her neighborhood seem to be avoiding her.
Knútsdóttir is a prolific author in Iceland; “The Night Guest” is her first work to be published into English, and it benefits greatly from Mary Robinette Kowal’s clear, lucid translation. It feels so grounded in reality that when the elements of horror arrive — and they do, first slowly and then in a rush — they’re all the more upsetting.
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