Cuise Control is out. A man's wife gets pulled off his company's cruise at the last minute, and right as he's grinning about being off the leash for once, no wife, no ring, nobody watching, his teenage draughter talks her way into her mother's spot. What he doesn't tell her: the cabin's booked for a couple. One bed. Twelve days on open water and nowhere for her to go. It's a mean one, the villain in the driver's seat the whole way, and you spend the entire book locked in his head, so you don't get one inch of distance from what he does out there. Fifteen chapters, first-person, complete. No rescue. No happy ending. Just an ending. It's up now, start to finish.
And the new one I've only just started is called In Her Face.
A woman named Robin dies young and leaves three people who can't let her go: the husband who still reaches for her in the dark, the best friend who loved her quietly her whole life and married the widower just to stay close to what was left of her, and the daughter who barely knew her and would give anything to.
So the daughter goes looking. And there's exactly one place her mother is still warm and breathing, and it's her own grieving father. Here's the part I couldn't stop writing: she teaches herself to be Robin. The voice off old home videos, the tilt of the head, the way her mother went first at everything. She studies the dead woman until she can walk into the dark and be the wife he's grieving. And he lets her. God, does he let her.
It goes all the way. No fade, no flinch, wrong in ways that are going to sit with you for a while. And under all the heat it's a sad one, because every one of the three of them knows exactly what they're doing to each other and not one of them can stop. Somebody bleeds for it. Somebody doesn't make it out whole. But somebody, for once, gets a door that opens instead of one that closes.
If you loved Raw Prose, this is me reaching for that again. Whether it gets near it, that's yours to call. More soon.
— Kinjite