Two ambitious post-doc scientists share a deadly secret in Edgar Award-winning crime writer Megan Abbott's Give Me Your Hand. That secret breeds more secrets while Kit Owens and Diane Fleming vie for professional kudos as investigators under the renowned Dr. Lena Severin. During high school, Kit and Diane shared difficult family home lives but were fierce academic and athletic competitors. Although they followed divergent paths to undergraduate scholarships, Ph.D.s and prestigious lab assignments, they get thrown together again as collaborators on Severin's studies of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). Severin is determined to discover the biological genesis of that "purple marrow of female rage." Kit would kill to work for her idol Severin, whom she pictures with a "mouth like a razor, brain like a god's, and ion pump where her heart should be." And kill she does--or doesn't she?
The increasingly lauded Abbott (You Will Know Me) leans toward edgy, complex female characters elbowing their ways into positions of knowledge and influence. Vacillating between self-doubt and inordinate pride, between social reticence and professional excess, Kit is driven to succeed even if that means crossing a few lines, compromising professed values or revealing secrets shared in confidence. After a night of too many Long Island Iced Teas, she beds another lab tech and gives away more about Diane's past than she means to--or was that her intent? As Severin's lab begins to flow with more human blood than that of research mice, it becomes the site of study that goes beyond "the whole rickety biological pathophysiology of women." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.