Tova Mirvis's fourth novel, We Would Never, tells the taut story of an acrimonious divorce case gone horribly wrong. Inspired by real-life headlines, this gripping mystery explores the before and after of a murder, as the victim's soon-to-be-ex-wife comes under suspicion and her family huddles around to protect her, but also to conceal some unpleasant truths. As she did with her previous works set in Orthodox Jewish communities, Mirvis expertly digs into the dynamics of a tight-knit group: here, it's a nuclear family that might seem perfect to onlookers yet hides more than its fair share of secrets and betrayals under a wholesome façade.

The book opens in 2019, in the aftermath of a shocking crime. Twenty miles outside Bangor, Maine, a woman is sheltering in a cabin with her sleeping daughter, watching YouTube footage of someone being interrogated about the murder of her husband. In the middle of a contentious divorce, Jonah Gelman, a SUNY professor about to release his second novel, was shot dead in his Binghamton home. Suspicion inevitably falls on his wife, at least initially. "I would never do something like that. My family would never do anything so awful," the woman in the video insists to the police.

"It's impossible to believe that the woman on the screen is me," the narrator marvels. Thus readers are introduced to Hailey Marcus Gelman: daughter of Solomon and Sherry Marcus of West Palm Beach, Fla.; younger sister to Nate, a rising dermatologist, and Adam, who runs a dog shelter; and mother of young Maya.

A deft structure intersperses short passages of Hailey's present-tense narration with extended flashbacks to earlier moments in her marriage and family life, ultimately focusing on the mid-divorce weeks she spent at her parents' Florida home. Through the use of the close third person, Mirvis gives intimate access to the thoughts and motivations of the members of the Marcus family. Patriarch Sol was devastated when, early in his aborted academic career, his department chair appropriated his research. Sherry is desperate to preserve the image of a warm family, even though Adam has never felt he fits in and has been estranged from her for years because of a tragic accident that occurred during Hailey's wedding festivities. Nate, though self-assured and sometimes glib, struggles with the ethics of some of his decisions.

Sol's dermatology clinic is a true family affair. Sherry is the secretary; Nate has gradually shouldered an equal share of the patients and plans to take over once Sol retires. But even in this cozy arrangement, multiple complications arise. Sol feels betrayed that Nate has been furtively steering the business toward cosmetic services. He and Sherry are unaware that Nate has been seeing Tara, the office manager, even though she has a son by her long-term fiancé. And the whole family is soon rocked by news that Sol has Parkinson's disease and will not be able to practice for much longer. Nate's casual musing ends up providing an astute assessment of the Marcuses: "Everyone was damaged. Only some people bore evidence on the surface."  

Meanwhile, Hailey's divorce is simmering. She and Jonah, who is opinionated and brash, argue via text messages. Petty matters take on outsized significance, as when Maya's favorite stuffed bunny becomes a bargaining chip. At a hearing, Hailey petitions the judge to be allowed to move to Florida with Maya. She had never wanted to live in Binghamton but agreed to because of Jonah's job. Jonah objects vociferously to his daughter moving so far away from him. At this tense moment, Nate proposes to Sherry that she--without telling Sol--make Jonah an offer of $250,000 to accept Hailey's move to Florida. But Jonah refuses. He always hated Florida, thought Sherry was controlling, and strived throughout his marriage to keep at a remove from Hailey's family; he certainly feels justified in his poor opinion after the bribery attempt.

Hailey recalls that, as she was growing up, "her mother's favorite saying was that they were a family who would do anything for each other." Now, as she looks back on events several months after the murder while staying at Adam's remote rural compound, she wonders what really happened after Jonah rejected the money. Did she unconsciously doom him by wishing him dead? Conversations that seemed like harmless banter at the time--Nate joking that Sherry could kill Jonah and bury him out back--aren't so funny now. But Sherry vowed that no one in the family had anything to do with Jonah's death, and Hailey believes her.

The dramatic irony between Hailey's knowledge and the additional facts revealed in the novel's pages augment the suspense. Mirvis keeps readers guessing, paving the way for a key twist at the three-quarter point, as well as a major switchback later on. We Would Never poses compelling questions about families' secrets and self-mythologizing, taking a fraught situation and ratcheting up the extreme incidents and emotions until it's finally revealed who would--and did--turn to murder. --Rebecca Foster

Tova Mirvis (photo: Aynsley Floyd)

Tova Mirvis is the author of a memoir, The Book of Separation, as well as three novels: Visible City, The Outside World, and national bestseller The Ladies Auxiliary. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Poets and Writers, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, Mass. Her fourth novel, We Would Never, a thriller featuring a tight-knit family, will be published by Avid Reader Press on February 11, 2025.

Your previous book, The Book of Separation, was a memoir of leaving your faith and marriage; an acrimonious divorce case is the background for We Would Never. How did you approach the topic differently in autobiography and fiction, while allowing your experience to add authenticity?

My inspiration for We Would Never was a true-crime case that hit me in a raw, vulnerable spot. The story was of a spousal murder that took place during a contentious divorce, and when I first read about it, I was in the midst of my own divorce. How, I tried to understand, can a separation spiral so out of control that it ends in murder?

To spend years writing a book, I have to feel a kind of emotional friction--like the sandpapery surface needed to strike a match. A story about a divorce gone awry--that lit my writing on fire. I decided to take the bones of that true-crime story and transform it into a novel. And while We Would Never is not based on my own life, I did make use of what I know about divorce--how it can feel obliterating and unmoor you from who you imagined yourself to be. When I was writing memoir, I sometimes felt like I had to tread carefully. In fiction, I can let my imagination run free.

Several of your books are set in Orthodox Jewish communities. Although the Marcus family is Jewish, faith is a fairly low-key element here. Were aspects of the family dynamic inspired by your background--the protectiveness, the sense of a conspiracy of silence?

What interested me in this novel were the family dynamics, the enmeshments and the longings and the estrangements--not how this family exists within a particular faith community, as I've explored in the past, but how they function as an almost sealed family unit. So, in this way, it does feel like a departure and a chance to explore new themes.

But at the same time, I think that, no matter how far we travel, we always carry parts of our backgrounds with us. In this novel, I was interested in the universal theme of forgiveness. This led me to include a little bit about the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and gave me a way to ask questions about what it means to forgive and what happens when we are unable to do so.

This idea of people who "would do anything" for their family or "would never" do certain other things when in extreme situations--how did you hope to push back at that? Can we ever really know what people will do?

That question really fascinated me. We might claim we would never do something, but I'm not sure we always know what we might be capable of in situations we can't yet imagine. Under what set of circumstances might someone commit an act they once believed was impossible? What combination of anger and loyalty and fear might enable someone to lose their moral compass? I was especially interested in the idea of escalation, how with a series of small actions, events can spiral out of control; sometimes we might not realize how far we've gone until we're already there.

What role does Adam play in this family? Why was it essential to have one estranged member who is mostly an outsider yet still has crucial inside knowledge?

The outsider is always one of my favorite characters--the person close enough to have access but far enough to see things in a new and often contrary way. And the outsider offers the reader another perspective on what they are seeing. In creating Adam, I thought about the painful loneliness of feeling separate in a setting where you expect to belong. He doesn't adhere to the family mythology and stands in contrast to his mother's fervent desire for them to be close. And his distance has a ricocheting effect on the decisions his family members eventually make.

With news of his diagnosis, readers perhaps start to sideline Sol in the same way that his family does. Was this a deliberate way of exposing how the ill are discounted?

Sol's illness is important in exactly this way. I wanted to explore what happens when an established family dynamic is forced to undergo a change--and illness is one of the most profound ways this can happen. Sol's diagnosis upends expectations about the future. He is sidelined, both in the family and professionally, which creates a vacuum in which the plot begins to unfold.

I'm curious about the choice of locales: rural Maine, Binghamton, N.Y., and West Palm Beach, Fla. Do these places have personal significance, and/or what metaphorical parts do they play?

A sense of place is very important to me, which I attribute to my Memphis upbringing and my love of the great Southern writers, for whom place was essential.

The true-crime story that inspired me took place in Florida. While I changed many details, Florida remained. I live in the Boston area but spend time in Florida because my husband works there several days a week. I have come to love the natural beauty of Florida, the tropical flowers always in bloom and the lush greenery that is simultaneously manicured and wild. That became important in creating the visual setting for the book.

I chose rural Maine because it felt like an opposite to West Palm Beach. I wanted to alternate between the stifling humidity of South Florida, with its swampy sense of entanglement, and the cold pristineness, the quiet loneliness, of Maine.

As for Binghamton (where the murder takes place), there was an element of randomness. A few years back, I was supposed to give a book talk at SUNY Binghamton. I was at the airport when I got a call saying there had been a murder on campus and the event was canceled. Sometimes details lodge in your mind, and then, one day, they make their way onto the page.

This is the first time you've written something approaching a thriller. How did you figure out when and how much to reveal?

It is the first time I've written a book with this degree of suspense, and it was very tricky to figure out how to both reveal and conceal, sometimes at the same time. It felt like a sleight-of-hand, trying to hide clues in plain sight. I made charts and wrote many drafts. To give you a sense of just how many, every time I did a major revision, I updated the name of the file. The final version was called New Novel 58. --Rebecca Foster