Perfect Little Children: A Novel

On her way to her son’s football practice one afternoon, Beth takes a detour to the beautiful, showy house where her former best friend Flora lived twelve years ago. Beth and Flora have long been out of touch, but Beth can’t shake her curiosity about whatever happened to her friend. She doesn’t expect to actually see Flora, but, to her surprise, she sees Flora getting out of an SUV with two little children. She hears Flora call to them, using the names of the children Beth remembers. Yet this is impossible because the children Beth remembers would be teenagers by now. Beth struggles to reconcile what she’s witnessed with what the reality must be, but she can’t make it make sense. There’s a mystery here, and, worse, danger. Her bond with Flora has loosened, but Beth feels an overwhelming compulsion to figure out what’s going on—before harm comes to those children, or to Flora herself.

The mystery at the heart of Perfect Little Children has nothing to do with science fiction, an expectation that is suggested in the cover copy. Instead, as Beth delves deeper into the confounding tangle of familiar names and unfamiliar faces, of what she knows to be true and what appears to be true, we get a chilling portrait of a marriage steeped in cruelty, and of a woman frantic to protect her children—at any cost.