Tanya Dubois finds her husband, Frank, dead at the bottom of the stairs. "As far as I could tell, he fell down the staircase all on his own." The obvious next step, then, would be to dial 911, right? Wrong. Tanya changes her identity, acquires fake documents, and gets the hell outta Dodge. Because this isn't the first time she's gone on the run, and no one would believe she didn't kill Frank.
Soon after she leaves town, Tanya--now using the name Amelia Keen--meets Blue, a bartender who has unsettling hidden talents. She helps Amelia out of a sticky situation, but it's unclear whether Blue can be trusted--or will put Amelia in further danger. As her troubles escalate and more deaths occur, what does become certain to Tanya/Amelia (neither is her real name) is that the only way to stop running is to return to where she started and face her demons.
In her thrilling standalone, The Passenger, Lisa Lutz (the Spellman series) keeps the pace blistering without sacrificing characterization. She doesn't do perfect or cuddly; her people are regular folks doing the best they can with extremely bad luck. The protagonist, who goes through many name changes, is flawed and flinty, but her loneliness from her years in hiding is palpable. Blue is also vivid, someone with a sense of menace lurking beneath her coolness, keeping readers guessing about her motives. Both are women who start out as passengers in their own lives, until they decide it's time to take the wheel. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd