cover image What Remains of Me

What Remains of Me

Alison Gaylin. Morrow, $25.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-236985-7

Gaylin (Hide Your Eyes) smoothly alternates between past and present in this melodramatic Hollywood whodunit. In 1978, aspiring actress Catherine Lund, frustrated by her lack of acclaim, leaps to her death from an overlook in the San Gabriel Valley. Two years later, her fraternal twin sister, Kelly, high on pot and coke, shoots director John McFadden to death in his Hollywood Hills mansion and is sentenced to 25 years to life for murder. In 1995, Kelly marries Shane Marshall, the son of movie star Sterling Marshall, in the California women’s prison where she’s incarcerated. After Shane’s mother, Mary, helps Kelly to get paroled in 2005, the celebrity criminal begins working for a website aimed at those seeking to cheat on their spouses. In 2010, Kelly again becomes a murder suspect, after her father-in-law is gunned down. The path to the truth—both about Sterling’s murder and McFadden’s—takes many surprising twists, though readers should be prepared for a lack of sympathetic characters. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents. (Feb.)