A Simple Favor: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
"Riveting and brilliantly structured, A Simple Favor is an edge-of-your seat domestic thriller about a missing wife and mother that relies on a rotating cast of unreliable narrators to ingeniously examine the cost of competitive mom-friends, the toll of ordinary marital discontent and the fallacy of the picture-perfect, suburban family."—Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author
She's your best friend. She knows all your secrets. That's why she's so dangerous.
A single mother's life is turned upside down when her best friend vanishes in this chilling debut thriller in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.
It starts with a simple favor—an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another. When her best friend, Emily, asks Stephanie to pick up her son Nicky after school, she happily says yes. Nicky and her son, Miles, are classmates and best friends, and the five-year-olds love being together—just like she and Emily. A widow and stay-at-home mommy blogger living in woodsy suburban Connecticut, Stephanie was lonely until she met Emily, a sophisticated PR executive whose job in Manhattan demands so much of her time.
But Emily doesn't come back. She doesn't answer calls or return texts. Stephanie knows something is terribly wrong—Emily would never leave Nicky, no matter what the police say. Terrified, she reaches out to her blog readers for help. She also reaches out to Emily's husband, the handsome, reticent Sean, offering emotional support. It's the least she can do for her best friend. Then, she and Sean receive shocking news. Emily is dead. The nightmare of her disappearance is over.
Or is it? Because soon, Stephanie will begin to see that nothing—not friendship, love, or even an ordinary favor—is as simple as it seems.
A Simple Favor is a remarkable tale of psychological suspense—a clever and twisting free-fall of a ride filled with betrayals and reversals, twists and turns, secrets and revelations, love and loyalty, murder and revenge. Darcey Bell masterfully ratchets up the tension in a taut, unsettling, and completely absorbing story that holds you in its grip until the final page. Don't miss the film version starring Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively and Henry Golding!
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Darcey Bell. (2017). A Simple Favor: A Novel. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Darcey Bell. 2017. A Simple Favor: A Novel. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Darcey Bell, A Simple Favor: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2017.
MLA Citation (style guide)Darcey Bell. A Simple Favor: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2017.
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Darcey Bell was born in 1981 and raised on a dairy farm in western Iowa. She is a preschool teacher in Chicago. A Simple Favor is her first novel.
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"Riveting and brilliantly structured, A Simple Favor is an edge-of-your seat domestic thriller about a missing wife and mother that relies on a rotating cast of unreliable narrators to ingeniously examine the cost of competitive mom-friends, the toll of ordinary marital discontent and the fallacy of the picture-perfect, suburban family."—Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author
She's your best friend. She knows all your secrets. That's why she's so dangerous.
A single mother's life is turned upside down when her best friend vanishes in this chilling debut thriller in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.
It starts with a simple favor—an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another. When her best friend, Emily, asks Stephanie to pick up her son Nicky after school, she happily says yes. Nicky and her son, Miles, are classmates and best friends, and the five-year-olds love being together—just like she and Emily. A widow and stay-at-home mommy blogger living in woodsy suburban Connecticut, Stephanie was lonely until she met Emily, a sophisticated PR executive whose job in Manhattan demands so much of her time.
But Emily doesn't come back. She doesn't answer calls or return texts. Stephanie knows something is terribly wrong—Emily would never leave Nicky, no matter what the police say. Terrified, she reaches out to her blog readers for help. She also reaches out to Emily's husband, the handsome, reticent Sean, offering emotional support. It's the least she can do for her best friend. Then, she and Sean receive shocking news. Emily is dead. The nightmare of her disappearance is over.
Or is it? Because soon, Stephanie will begin to see that nothing—not friendship, love, or even an ordinary favor—is as simple as it seems.
A Simple Favor is a remarkable tale of psychological suspense—a clever and twisting free-fall of a ride filled with betrayals and reversals, twists and turns, secrets and revelations, love and loyalty, murder and revenge. Darcey Bell masterfully ratchets up the tension in a taut, unsettling, and completely absorbing story that holds you in its grip until the final page. Don't miss the film version starring Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively and Henry Golding!
- reviews
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"An intense, captivating, and astonishing thriller ending in an unforeseen and surprise ending; the premise: Be careful who you trust." — New York Journal of Books
"Bell's edgy first novel is chock-full of dirty little secrets, lies, and manipulations. Gone Girl devotees should reserve an advance copy and carve out uninterrupted time for this juicy read." — Library Journal
"[A] stylish and unsettling thriller...The plot stretches into increasingly dark territory, the narrative mixing familiar gimmicks in the thriller repertoire and producing an overall story that's just mysterious and weird enough to supply maximum satisfaction." — Toronto Star
"Sly, satirical, subversive: a deliciously poisoned cupcake of a story." — L. S. Hilton, author of Maestra
"Debut-novelist Bell ramps up suspense with authority in this domestic thriller, in which actions seem as inevitable as they are chilling. The audience that made GONE GIRL a publishing sensation is likely to take to this one, too." — Booklist (starred review)
"No one and nothing is what it seems in this page-turner." — Cleveland Plain Dealer
"This is a psychological thriller that is as hip and relevant as it is gripping. Darcey Bell somehow manages to satirize, hilariously, the ghastly self-righteousness of the online 'Mommy Bloggers' while at the same time pulling off a suburban mystery that ends with a twist that is as horridly satisfying as it is completely unexpected. I couldn't stop reading about these two truly terrifying moms!" — Plum Sykes, author of BERGDORF BLONDES
"What a wonderfully absorbing, unremittingly intense, endlessly surprising novel Darcey Bell has written. Her characters—in the worst way—never know what's going to happen next and nor—in the best way—does her reader. A SIMPLE FAVOR yields very complicated pleasures." — Margot Livesey, author of MERCURY and THE FLIGHT OF GEMMA HARDY
"A Simple Favor by Darcey Bell is a highly recommended, twisty domestic thriller...My rating kept going up as I was reading. The ending was pitch-perfect." — She Treads Softly
- premium: True
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January 9, 2017
In Bell’s convoluted debut, widowed mommy-blogger Stephanie Ward receives a call from her best friend, Emily Nelson, asking her to pick up Emily’s five-year-old son, Nicky, from school. There’s an emergency at work, Emily explains, but she’ll be by to get Nicky no later than 9 p.m. Nicky is best friends with Stephanie’s son, Miles, and the boys attend the same suburban Connecticut kindergarten, so Stephanie agrees. Days pass and Emily never appears, leading Stephanie to fear the worst. Emily’s husband, Sean, returns home from his European business trip and calls the police, who assume that Emily has simply run away—until her body washes up at her family’s lake house in Michigan. Stephanie initially seeks to comfort Sean, but when questions arise surrounding Emily’s death, she’s left wondering what is true and whom to trust. While Stephanie, Emily, and Sean share the narrative, Stephanie is the primary point-of-view character, and her vacuity and naïveté undercut the story’s tension and heft. Bell further squanders an intriguing setup with ill-defined stakes and tired, telegraphed plot twists. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary Agency.
- premium: True
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January 15, 2017
An insecure woman with an edgy past insinuates herself into the lives of a narcissistic, glamorous couple and finds herself in jeopardy.The formula is familiar: Bell's debut is a pale facsimile of The Girl on the Train. True to template, the novel tells the same story from the differing and self-serving perspectives of three narrators. Stephanie is a blogger who writes about mom issues. Recently widowed and raising small son Miles alone, she overshares all manner of anxieties on her blog. Her husband and her half brother died together in a tragic auto crash, but later we learn the edgy part: her husband had suspicions about her ongoing affair with her half brother. Stephanie forms a play-date friendship with fellow Connecticut mom Emily, a busy publicist for a top Manhattan fashion designer. Certainly, Emily has an unusual fondness for serial-killer movies and Patricia Highsmith novels--and, thanks to her high-powered job, is always sticking Stephanie with the kids--but Stephanie thinks, and blogs, that she's finally found a true friend. The two do share a common dysfunctional past: estrangement from Midwestern parents. After Emily disappears during a business trip, however, the POV shifts to her, and we learn that she and her Wall Street trader husband, Sean (who's the third narrator), planned to fake her death in order to cash in on a $2 million life insurance policy so they and their son, Nicky, could escape the rat race. From here, the typical who's-playing-whom standoff between the three principals unspools, and violence accelerates. There are plenty of rationalizations cited by Sean and Emily as to why their scam makes sense, in spite of the likelihood that $2 million is a drop in Sean's annual bonus bucket, and, in any case, how much time away from the rat race would it really buy? This is just one of many unconvincing motivations driving the plot, which will amply satisfy readers' lowest expectations. More like "girl on a train wreck."COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- premium: True
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February 15, 2017
Widowed mommy blogger Stephanie and Emily are good friends who met through their five-year-old sons. When Emily asks Stephanie to watch her son Nicky for several hours, she willingly agrees to the favor. Yet she becomes concerned when Emily does not return to retrieve Nicky. Stephanie's anxiety escalates with each passing day that Emily is missing. When Sean, Emily's husband, comes back from a business trip, Emily has been gone for six days. When a body is discovered that is identified as Emily's, their joint grief draws Stephanie and Sean closer. But things aren't always as they seem. Many secrets swirl around Emily's disappearance. Was she really the friend Stephanie thought she was? What life-altering skeletons in the closet are waiting to be exposed? VERDICT Bell's edgy first novel is chock-full of dirty little secrets, lies, and manipulations. Gone Girl devotees should reserve an advance copy and carve out uninterrupted time for this juicy read. [See Prepub Alert, 9/26/16; library outreach.]--Mary Todd Chesnut, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- premium: True
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October 15, 2016
Widowed mommy blogger Stephanie gladly helps Emily by picking up her five-year-old son, Nicky, at school. After all, she and Emily are best friends, as are their two sons. But Emily doesn't show up at Stephanie's to get Nicky at day's end. One big debut, with a 100,000-copy first printing, rights sold to 24 countries and territories, and film rights preempted by Fox 2000.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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"Riveting and brilliantly structured, A Simple Favor is an edge-of-your seat domestic thriller about a missing wife and mother that relies on a rotating cast of unreliable narrators to ingeniously examine the cost of competitive mom-friends, the toll of ordinary marital discontent and the fallacy of the picture-perfect, suburban family."—Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author
She's your best friend. She knows all your secrets. That's why she's so dangerous.
A single mother's life is turned upside down when her best friend vanishes in this chilling debut thriller in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.
It starts with a simple favor—an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another. When her best friend, Emily, asks Stephanie to pick up her son Nicky after school, she happily says yes. Nicky and her son, Miles, are classmates and best friends, and the five-year-olds love being together—just like she and...
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