Fragile: A Novel [Hardcover]

Lisa Unger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2010

Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows, a quaint, charming town outside of New York City. It’s a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another’s kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows’s insular embrace. As a psychologist, her knowledge of family histories provides powerful insights into her patients’ lives. So when the girlfriend of her teenage son, Rick, disappears, Maggie’s intuitive gift proves useful to the case—and also dangerous. 

Eerie parallels soon emerge between Charlene’s disappearance and the abduction of another local girl that shook the community years ago when Maggie was a teenager. The investigation has her husband, Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely.  Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn.  In a town where the past is always present, nobody is above suspicion, not even a son in the eyes of his father.  

“I know how a moment can spiral out of control,” Jones says to a shocked Maggie as he searches Rick’s room for incriminating evidence. “How the consequences of one careless action can cost you everything.”

As she tries to reassure him that Rick embodies his father in all of the important ways, Maggie realizes this might be exactly what Jones fears most. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene’s disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret—one that could destroy everything she holds dear. This thrilling novel about one community’s intricate yet fragile bonds will leave readers asking, How well do I know the people I love? and How far would I go to protect them?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in the Hollows, a secluded town about 100 miles outside New York City, Unger's contemporary thriller offers solid entertainment, but lacks the tension of her 2008 stand-alone, Black Out. Psychologist Maggie Cooper and her husband, Det. Jones Cooper, disagree on how to handle their rebellious son, 17-year-old Rick, who prefers to spend time with his band or holed up with his girlfriend, Charlene Murray. When Charlene disappears one night after a fight with her mother, Maggie and Jones wonder if she ran off to Manhattan, but are reminded of the disappearance 20 years earlier of Sarah Meyers, whose mutilated body was found after she vanished on her way home from school. Though the alleged killer confessed, there are still unanswered questions, and Maggie and Jones find themselves forced to revisit the past as suspicion falls on Rick. Since the Hollows is so small, characters continually rehash secrets--and rumors--so that Unger relies too heavily on the community's interconnectedness to bolster her plot.
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From Booklist

History repeats itself in the cozy suburban enclave of the Hollows when a teenage girl goes missing. Charlene’s disappearance strikes uncomfortably close to home for psychiatrist Maggie and her policeman husband, Jones, opening wounds that go back 20 years to when they, and Charlene’s mother, Melody, were high-school classmates and Maggie’s best friend, Sarah, was found brutally murdered. Jones and Melody carry a secret from that time, one that involves school bully turned town cop Travis Crosby. Now both Maggie and Jones’ son, Ricky, and Travis’ son, Marshall, are prime suspects in Charlene’s disappearance; and while Jones harbors unsettling opinions about Ricky, Maggie knows other disturbing facts about Marshall. As tensions mount with each passing hour that Charlene is gone, the parents must face the truth about the teenagers they were if they are to help the children they themselves have raised. Unger’s taut and edgy tale stealthily plumbs the depths of desperation that grow more dangerous with the passage of time. --Carol Haggas

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307393992
• ISBN-13: 978-0307393999
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #85,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lisa Unger is an award-winning New York Times and international bestselling author. Her novels have sold over 1 million copies in the U.S. and have been translated into 26 different languages.

Her writing has been hailed as "masterful" (St. Petersburg Times), "sensational" (Publishers Weekly) and "sophisticated" (New York Daily News) with "gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose" (Associated Press).

Novels:

DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND (2011)
Family Circle Magazine "Cool Reads for Hot Days".

FRAGILE (2010)
Good Morning America "Top Book Pick", Harper's Bazaar "Hot Books", Named "Emerging Author" by Target.

DIE FOR YOU (2009)
Good Housekeeping "Book Pick", Good Morning America & Parade "Great Summer Read", Today show "Top Summer Pick".

BLACK OUT (2008)
Florida Book Awards Medal, finalist for Prix Polar International Award, Today show "Top 10" Summer Read, BookSense Notable.

SLIVER OF TRUTH (2007)
Sequel to Beautiful Lies, BookSense Pick and Doubleday Bookclub Main Selection.

BEAUTIFUL LIES (2006)
International Book of the Month, BookSense Pick, Amazon.com's Top 10 Thriller and finalist for "Best Novel" by the International Thriller Writers.

Writing as Lisa Miscione:

ANGEL FIRE (2011 Re-release)
THE DARKNESS GATHERS (2011 Re-release)
TWICE (2012 Re-release)
SMOKE (2012 Re-release)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A moment of pleasure can lead to a lifetime of pain.", August 3, 2010

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fragile: A Novel (Hardcover)

Unger goes off the beaten track in this novel, but not so far as for her work to be unrecognizable. While contemporary, this mystery dredges up a town's past and reawakens dark secrets that have altered the lives of those involved. Not far from New York City, The Hollows enjoys a small town identity, neighbors who have known each other since grade school. The only anomaly is the younger generation, infected by the angst of the times and the usual anti-social behaviors of adolescence, once happy and playful children become sulking teenagers, no longer as pliable or as willing to endure their parents' failings or expectations. Unger uses this generation gap to frame her story, as Maggie, a psychologist returned from NYC to marry a high-school football player turned detective, Jones Cooper, the two raising a son, Ricky. Once a sweet, joyful little boy, Ricky has morphed to a sullen teen, resisting his mother's overtures and in constant conflict with his father.

The twist is in the secret history of The Hollows. When Ricky's girlfriend, Charlene, disappears, everyone remembers another disappearance from years ago, the death of a classmate that has reverberated through the lives of the main characters and left many with uneasy consciences. And for all the disaffection of the younger generation, more than one older resident is disturbed when long-buried secrets are unearthed. While the father-son conflict is exacerbated when Jones investigates Charlene's whereabouts, Maggie jumps to her son's defense to avoid concerns about the state of her marriage, counseling patients in an office connected to her home. Much of the drama is stirred up by Maggie's fears and lack of professional boundaries, but there is no shortage of guilty parties as Unger taps into the small town psyche of The Hollows. Sometimes obvious, sometimes clever, Unger indulges in a lot of emotionalism and the dashed expectations of youth. But that is her style- and her charm- as a writer, the murky territory of memory and forgiveness. Luan Gaines/2010.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bogged down with too many unnecessary details, September 14, 2010

By 

C Wahlman "cdub" (Merrillville, IN) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Fragile: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Lisa Unger writes of a wonderful little town in New York, whose secrets are deadly. The Hollows, a sleepy town of upright citizens, seems to be plagued with loosing young girls. Two such cases converge one day as a young girl runs away, or is she abducted? This parallels a similar tragedy decades earlier. The whole town is interwoven in each others' lives, so it is no surprise that everyone in this small town has everything to do with every event.

The overall story is bogged down by too many instances of intertwined lives, back stories, and little climaxes. Every page has the coming of disaster, but quickly resolves itself. The overall plot of the two abductions fluctuate in an interesting suspense, but this suspense is lost as the story continues to drag on and on and on.

Yet the worst problem with this novel is that Unger assumes you cannot get her point: we are fragile, interconnected, imperfect, yet beautiful. But she continually hits you over the head with everything.

After a while I found myself saying enough already, resolve this. And she eventually does, and the story wraps up perfectly with a perfect, yet fragile bow.

If Unger had assumed more from her audience, trimmed some of the fat and left some things to the readers' imaginations, it would have been more suspenseful novel. It was an interesting story, it just needed better execution.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A SENSITIVE, PENETRATING STORY OF COMPLEX PEOPLE, August 12, 2010

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fragile: A Novel (Hardcover)

From "When Jones Cooper was younger, he didn't believe in mistakes" to 323 pages later and "As she told them all about her buried memory, she felt an awe at how all their separate lives were twisted and tangled, growing over an around one another...,"
FRAGILE enchants. It is a sensitive, penetrating story of complex people burdened by the past.

Jones, a cop,lives with his psychologist wife, Maggie, and rebellious teenage son, Ricky, in The Hollows, a small insular town outside of New York City. It's the kind of place that Maggie had once found dull, constraining, but now finds comforting as people know each other, and seemingly care for one another. It seems that Ricky might benefit from some observation as he's a punk kid with a silver hoop in his nose, sometimes referred to as "Johnny Rotten" by his dad. Try as Maggie may she can't seem to reach Ricky any more but loves him with all her heart, remembering "...how pure and unblemished, how soft and pink his baby skin had been."

Ricky is going with Charlene, an undesirable companion in the eyes of Maggie and Jones. She is "a little girl lost hiding behind black eyeliner and vamp red lipstick." However, Maggie does her best to understand, to accept Charlene because she loves Ricky.

However, understanding and acceptance go out the window when Charlene vanishes. To some her disappearance is a frightening reminder of a teenager who was abducted and murdered years ago when Maggie herself was a teenager. Jones is leading the investigation in efforts to find Charlene and, shocking to Maggie, begins to look very closely at their son. A once tranquil community is once again shattered by a mysterious disappearance.

In a desperate attempt to prove Ricky innocent of any wrongdoing Maggie begins an investigation of her own and makes a shocking discovery.

No novice at creating suspenseful, gripping narratives Lisa Unger has once again penned a stay-up-all-night story.

Enjoy!

- Gail Cooke