In You Will Know Me, Katie and Eric Knox are just settling into parenthood when their rambunctious three-year-old, Devon, loses two toes to a lawn mower Eric carelessly leaves running. Determined to help Devon overcome this childhood trauma, they enroll her in a local gymnastics group. It quickly becomes clear that their ordinary family has an extraordinary athlete on its hands. They bring her to the famous Coach T and his BelStars gym. Teddy Belfour is a "silver-maned lion, the gymnast whisperer, the salto Svengali," and Devon joins his "fearsome BelStars girls whippeting around with faces grim as Soviets." Nothing in the Knox family will ever be the same.
Megan Abbott (The Fever) captures the devotion, sacrifice and obsession that comes to a family with a prodigy athlete. Devon gets better and better--and less social. Other girls envy and disparage her. While their bodies age into teen curves and their gossip turns to boys, Devon remains a focused gymnastics machine--until a handsome young construction worker comes to build an Olympic-rated foam pit under the gym's vault.
Ryan Beck has a rumored delinquent past, but the girls--and their moms--are smitten. When he is mysteriously killed by a hit-and-run driver, the curtains part and Abbott reveals the secrets, jealousies and outright malevolence under the surface of the Knox family and the BelStars boosters.
Abbott is working at the top of her craft, and You Will Know Me is a crime novel where the crime is only a catalyst for an accomplished exploration of ordinary people's unraveling when they become obsessed with the extraordinary among them. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.