Some narrators are unreliable--and then there's Cole Simmonds. His version of events goes under the microscope in Araminta Hall's One of the Good Guys, a marvelously unorthodox thriller that would play as a spoof of modern-day gender politics if the stakes weren't so shudder-makingly high.
Cole, who is getting divorced, has just moved from London to England's South Coast to work as a wildlife ranger. To another recent transplant, he insists that his ex, Melanie, is "trying to turn everyone against me now, but I don't know why or what she could have said"; when last he spoke with Melanie, "she was saying this really weird shit about how she'd told her mum 'everything.' " That "everything," which Melanie rehashes for readers when she takes the novel's point-of-view reins, is blood-chilling stuff. So are the comments made in various tweets, newscasts, and other forums, following the newsworthy disappearance of two young women: in an effort to raise funds for a domestic violence charity, they were walking along the South Coast, whose cliffside barriers it was Cole's job to check, when they vanished.
One of the Good Guys goes nowhere that readers will expect. It augments its study of the feminist-on-the-outside/misogynist-on-the-inside male with characters' opinions on sexual consent, working motherhood, and other relevant hot-button issues. Hall (Imperfect Women) pokes fun at all holders of extreme positions, and she supplies no easy answers for readers other than to the question of what novel would inspire a great discussion at their next book club. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer