#BookReview :: Relative Evil by Debra Erfert

Inspired by her father and his pretty young wife, novelist Claire Abney allows her imagination to run wild and pens a best-selling thriller. However, as Glen Abney suffers multiple freak accidents, she wonders exactly where the prose stops and reality begins.

Claire screens her family from the prying eyes of success with a masculine pen name and her handsome editor, her shill for photo ops and book signings. But her father’s unexpected death, and bungled attempts on her own life, force her to admit the strategy may have backfired. Now, with the help of her brother and Max, her dreamy frontman, she must separate truth from fiction. Before life imitating art becomes deadly. 




Claire Abney is a romance novelist. Inspired by her father’s new marriage, she decides to write a suspense novel based on Munchausen syndrome. She does her research well and publishes her story under a male pen name to avoid letting her family in on her suspicion and to avoid conflict. She ropes in her editor to help maintain the façade. But all is not well within the family. Her father falls victim to several apparently innocent accidents. Claire then loses her father to death and fiction soon starts to resemble real life too much. Is Claire and the rest of her family safe?

The author gives us a sudden start by throwing in several of Claire’s family in the first incident. Instead of slowly building up each character she introduces us to them and then proceeds to divulge their various shades to us. The best characters have shades of grey while the worst ones have their moments in the light. Claire is a strong and intuitive person, a good protagonist, one that I enjoyed rooting for. However, I would certainly have liked to know more about what made some of the characters tick.

The plot while seems simple at first glance, it too has various shades like the characters in it. I loved how the author fleshed out the motivations and the quirks of each character that made them believable and just perfect fit into the novel at the same time. The narration style may seem a bit abrupt at the beginning but soon gets into a familiar rhythm. Overall, an page turner and entertaining.

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