Give Me Your Hand

Starred review from May 21, 2018
Kit Owens and Diane Fleming, the protagonists of this nuanced tale of soured friendships, blood-soaked ambition, and desperate murder from Thriller Award–winner Abbott (You Will Know Me), were once fast friends—until Diane tells Kit a secret so dark that it shatters their friendship, sending Kit into a minor tailspin. But high school is drawing to a close, and Kit hopes she’ll never see Diane again. Fast-forward more than a decade, and Kit is working in a lab under the impressive Dr. Lena Severin. When a new grant is announced to study premenstrual dysphoric disorder, Kit can hardly contain her shock as Diane reappears as a newly poached superstar from a competing lab. Kit and Diane each want coveted spots on Dr. Severin’s PMDD research team, and as the only women in the male-dominated lab, they must deal with their colleagues’ thinly veiled misogyny. When Diane’s secret pulses to the surface, lives are lost and futures are put in doubt in a mad rush to keep the past in its place. No writer can touch Abbott in the realm of twisted desire and relationships between women, both intimate and feral. Agent: Daniel Conaway, Writer’s House.

September 15, 2018

Abbott (You Will Know Me) fills her novel with concerns about and the reality of blood in many ways--including murder, of course. Focusing on a competition for a spot on a research team with a grant to study premenstrual dysmorphic disorder (PMDD), the story centers on frenemies Kit and Diane trying to impress the woman in charge of the project, their idol, Dr. Severin. Abbott moves back and forth with "then and now" sections to create the present tensions and backstories of these women who share old secrets and must hide new ones. The story line is compelling, but there are weaknesses that detract, including some predictability until a twist at the end. Kit, the main narrator, comes across with a lack of self-confidence and extraordinary jealousy that lead her to bad decisions. Diane is overly self-controlled, there and not there, in properly intriguing ways, haunting Kit throughout the years. The relationship between Diane and Dr. Severin is the bigger mystery here. Reader Chloe Cannon does a solid job. VERDICT Recommended for larger mystery collections. ["This novel adds to Abbott's reputation as a significant writer of suspense": LJ Xpress Reviews 6/8/18 review of the Little, Brown hc.]--Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2018
A rising star in a famous laboratory can track her success back to the one person in her life she'd like to forget.As a teenager, Kit Owens is fine with doing just enough to set herself up for a comfortable life. She never had a compelling reason to push herself until Diane Fleming quietly stepped into her life. The new girl with a troubled past, Diane seems to care only about achieving perfection, and she doesn't understand why Kit wouldn't want the same. The two become each other's motivation to do better, go harder, working toward the common goal of a science scholarship funded by a doctor famous for her research on taboo disorders related to the female sex. Until one night, when Diane shares something with Kit that is terrible enough--"the worst thing anyone's ever told me"--to erase any bond they have. More than 10 years later, Kit is the hardest working member of Dr. Severin's lab, angling for a coveted spot on the new premenstrual dysphoric disorder research team. Her lab mates, all men, are convinced she has it in the bag. But then Dr. Severin drops the bomb that she's poached a stellar researcher from Harvard who will join the team immediately. That person is Diane. Kit has buried the memory of her old friend under years of pipetting, thousands of precisely cut samples, and days bent under a fume hood: "After a bad dream, a Diane dream, I avoid the mirror...certain that if I looked, she might be there." Who could truly forget Diane? And when she walks through the lab door the next day, "everything begins again." Abbott (You Will Know Me, 2016, etc.) has made the dark desires and secrets of the female psyche the life force of her novels. Under the surface of Kit and Diane's research on women plagued by an "unbearable push of feelings, feelings gone out of control...a wretched curse" lives their own shared curse, something strong enough to tip the balance of their carefully regimented, chemical-clean world.In Abbott's deft hands, friendship is fused to rivalry, and ambition to fear, with an unsettling level of believability. It will take more than a cold shower to still the blood thumping in your ears when you finish this.

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Starred review from May 1, 2018
Kit Owens has a secret?actually, it's Diane Fleming's secret, shared when the two of them were teens, but the shocking revelation creates a burden and a twisted bond Kit wishes they didn't have. The adult Kit is a postdoc lab worker fighting for a spot on the research team of the spiky, darkly glamorous Dr. Severin, who's just won an NIH research grant to study premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Like PMS only much, much worse, according to Kit, PMDD, in its worst extremes, drives women to violent and destructive acts. When Diane makes an unexpected reappearance in Kit's life, in her lab, there are fatal consequences, and Kit finds that the cord connecting her to Diane may strangle them both. Once again, Abbott (You Will Know Me, 2016) plunges us deep into a vividly realized world of intense competition and creates life-or-death stakes where we wouldn't have known to look for them. There's claustrophobic tension between scrappy, striving Kit and Diane, the golden girl who always seemed a little bit off; even better is the nested power struggle between the three female characters, studying a misunderstood women's health issue in the mostly male milieu of research science. Procedural fans may have a few nitpicks, but this is a brilliant riff on hard science, human nature, and the ultimate unknowability of the human brain.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)