Bad Marie

From Publishers WeeklyDermansky follows her lauded debut, Twins, with a trite tail about an ex-con's unlikely re-entry to the world. After serving six years for harboring a fugitive--her bank robber boyfriend--30-year-old Marie is released and misses the decisionless ease of prison life. She finds work as a live-in nanny (nothing like a felon watching your pride and joy) for two-and-a-half-year-old Caitlin, the daughter of her childhood best friend, Ellen, with whom she has a rocky, competitive relationship. In a hard-to-believe coincidence, Ellen is married to the French author, Benoît Doniel, whose book Marie read repeatedly while in prison, and soon enough, Benoît and Marie kick off an affair and decide to run away to Paris together with Caitlin. But when Benoît's true colors are displayed before even landing in the City of Lights (thanks to another unbelievable coincidence), Marie finds herself taking on the role of a single mother in a strange land, though her travails never really impede on her relatively charmed streak. It's off-putting how heavily the plot relies on implausible twists, and Marie is too sketchily drawn to carry the full weight of the story. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From BooklistDermansky follows her bold debut, Twins (2005), with a wickedly nihilistic and suspenseful tale of erotic mayhem. Impulsive, larcenous, and utterly self-absorbed, not to mention vampishly beautiful, Marie rather liked prison, where she could read her favorite book, a novel by a French author named Benoît Doniel, over and over. Her handsome young Mexican lover and inept accomplice hung himself in jail, and her mother won't even pick her up, so upon her release, Marie heads for her old friend Ellen's swanky New York apartment. Smug Ellen knows how dangerous Marie is, yet she desperately needs a nanny for her precocious toddler daughter, Caitlin. As for her husband, it's none other than Benoît Doniel. Bewitching and commanding, Dermansky creates a template for either a comedy of sexual errors or an all-out tragedy, then keeps readers guessing until the very end. Set in New York, Paris, the Riviera, and Mexico, this is an edgy, speedy, stylish, unpredictable, funny, and heart-stopping tale of a damaged soul who finally finds love in the clear-eyed intelligence, trust, and joy of a child. --Donna Seaman