Lindsay Hunter (Eat Only When You're Hungry; Ugly Girls) starts her enthralling Hot Springs Drive with a house that witnesses a murder. She then introduces readers to the victim, Theresa, asking them to also witness her murder. There's no pause for breath as Hunter shifts to Theresa's best friend, Jackie, reflecting on their first encounter in a hospital maternity wing: "I loved her immediately. Isn't that how all the great hatreds begin?" This sets up a tightly paced story of two families' undoing. Suburban motherhood and fading marital sparks spur the friends to join a weight-loss group, where Jackie's obsessive food consumption shifts to restriction that alters her body and ability to keep angry jealousy of Theresa's contentment at bay.
In sharp, heady prose, Hunter carries readers from character to character (Jackie's four boys, Theresa's daughter, both husbands, interstitials from those who aren't family members) as Jackie begins an affair with Theresa's husband while both neglecting her children and oppressively fostering their worst qualities. Hunter shapes unsettling dread in Jackie's oldest son, Douglas, whose unhealthy attachment to his manipulative mother culminates in a violent act, asking readers whether horrific actions are solely the responsibility of the doer or attributable to a tangled web of influence. Hunter builds to and looks back on an inciting incident in an urgent novel that is a searing study of banality and monstrosity, desire and control--and a story about women, their families, breaking points, and "the thing no one wants to admit: a home is held together by care, and quite often the one who cares is... well, you know." --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer