Icy fingers of fear run up my back despite the sweltering heat inside Grand/State station. The woman is on edge, and so am I — literally, at least. I always stand on the edge of the platform so I can be first on the train. One hard push is all it would take for me to fall onto the tracks. As bleak as the last eighteen months have been, no matter how ostracized I’ve become after Ryan’s suicide, I’ve made a new life for myself. I don’t want it to end here.
Woman on the Edge is another one of those “girl in danger” thrillers, a debut for author Samantha M. Bailey, and despite this apparently taking her six years to write, and despite the dozens of people she thanks for improving and ushering this novel into print, the whole thing comes off as hackneyed, amateurish, and unexciting. The only two redeeming qualities I can record: The premise is so ludicrous that I was compelled to keep reading to learn what Bailey thought would be a satisfying conclusion; and this is a mercifully short read. (Spoilerish — but not much beyond the book’s description — from here.)
I know what you want.
Don’t let anyone hurt her.
Love her for me, Morgan.
So, the premise: Morgan is waiting at the edge of a subway platform for her train to come when a strange woman — dishevelled and wild-eyed — approaches with a baby in her arms and thrusts it towards Morgan, calling her by name and begging her to protect her daughter, before jumping onto the tracks to her death. When the police arrive and take Morgan to the station for a witness statement, the detective who comes to interview her is the same one who investigated her husband’s recent suicide — a man who had bilked his clients (including all of Morgan’s family and friends) out of their life savings; a crime that everyone (the detective and all of Morgan’s family and friends) can’t quite believe Morgan didn’t know about and participate in. Realising that the detective now suspects that she snatched this baby before pushing the woman to her death, Morgan believes that only she can find out the truth about this woman and her motivations (despite her lawyer warning her to lay low and allow her private detective to investigate), and because Morgan is now alone in the world (all of her family, friends, and the charity she founded having cut her off) it’s really, really important for her to clear her name, and get custody of that baby.
The book is then divided into two alternating points-of-view: The timeline moves forward with Morgan as she carries out her harebrained investigation, and in alternate chapters, we meet the woman with the baby, Nicole, in the past before she became pregnant and watch as her story unspools to the point where she meets Morgan on the subway platform. If this is meant to be a mystery, the “who” and “what” are easy to anticipate, but if one is reading to learn the “why” behind any character’s behaviour, one will be sorely disappointed.
The plot is ridiculous and the line-by-line writing is worse. Someone must have told Bailey that details add authenticity, but the details she chose were a constant distraction to me. Every character’s height was recorded precisely, as in Tessa “was only five foot two but had so much inner strength” or Ben “must be around six foot three because he looms over my five foot seven frame.” Nicole was the founder and CEO of a luxury athleisurewear company, so I suppose it makes sense to telegraph her wealth by constantly name-dropping the luxury brands she surrounds herself with (Tiffany lamps, Prada luggage, a Viking range and Sub-Zero fridge), but even if she sells yoga pants and uses breathing techniques to control her anxiety, it never felt authentic for Nicole to abruptly think about her chakras:
• She could clear her heart chakra and be the mother her daughter deserved.
• Nicole had never fully balanced her third-eye chakra, the center of her deepest awareness.
• The sun rose high in the blue sky, a brilliant yellow orb, the colors of the destiny chakra. This was where she was supposed to be.
I found it distracting for Bailey to note every road and Chicago neighbourhood that people drive through, but my least favourite details were about the cars those people were driving — if it’s not important to the plot, why does this person drive a Nissan Altima and that one a Honda Civic? I get the lawyer having a "white Mercedes", I suppose, but was annoyed by Nicole getting into her “Lexus GS 350”. I don’t know what that is and cannot be arsed to Google it. And the absolute worst detail was Morgan being menaced on the road by someone in “a dark blue Prius”:
• I hear the roar of an engine revving, and the Prius speeds past me.
• She revs the engine, and the tires squeal as she jams on the gas and peels away.
• The Prius roared past her before she could get a second look.
Now, I’ve never actually been in a Prius, and I haven’t succeeded in learning if this famously silent electric vehicle actually “revs” or “roars”, but if a detail like that takes me out of the story, why couldn’t Bailey have chosen literally any other non-electric car to follow Morgan around? Couldn’t someone in the three pages of Acknowledgements have given her that feedback?
I don’t even want to get into how antifeminist this story is (Morgan and Nicole are supposedly both intelligent and driven, each founded an organisation out of passion and grit, and both are brought to their knees by their shady husbands and a sudden mania for motherhood as the only path to fulfillment), but hey, at least Morgan got butterflies when she met Nicole’s brother and decided to trust him based on that gut feeling, even if each of them suspect the other had something to do with the unhinging of Nicole; let’s squeeze in some romance, too, and try to milk a happy ending from one woman’s tragic death! I did not like this, and only because it’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, I’m rounding up to two stars.
