El Dorado Drive is another stealthy-steely triumph from Megan Abbott (You Will Know Me; Give Me Your Hand; Beware the Woman), arguably the foremost living author of feminist noir.
It's 2008, and even before the recession, the auto industry's decline was hobbling Detroit and the suburb of Grosse Pointe, where the three Bishop sisters have fallen on hard times. Pam is suing her ex-husband for raiding their kids' trust funds and doesn't know how she's going to cover her son's college tuition. Debra is putting all her resources into her husband's cancer treatments. And Harper--single, gay, and employed at a horse stable--has a gargantuan debt that she's not telling her sisters about because of where she got the money. Still, Harper is skeptical--initially, anyway--of Pam and Debra's sudden evangelism for the Wheel, a secret women's investment club that enlists feminist buzz phrases ("female empowerment," "women helping women") but sounds an awful lot like a pyramid scheme.
El Dorado Drive comprises hundreds of short, tense scenes presented from Harper's perspective as she weighs what to say aloud and what to withhold--from her sisters, from the police when a grisly crime brings everything crashing down. Together, Abbott's brief scenes add up to a muscular plot that stutter-steps to its sublime, unforeseeable conclusion. Like the best noir, this one gives readers the thrill of watching from a safe distance as characters face tough choices, make the wrong ones, and give every indication that they will do so again. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer