BookBrowse Reviews The Favor by Nora Murphy

BookBrowse:

Two women, total strangers yet living eerily parallel lives, try to escape their circumstances in this revenge-fueled thriller debut.

It all starts with a chance encounter at a liquor store. When Leah spots McKenna carefully shopping for beer and wine — and later, when she drives by McKenna's house — it's like looking at a version of herself from the recent past. Leah now spends her days in the basement of her large suburban home, isolated not only from the job she adored but also from the friends and activities that used to bring her joy. She's moved on from those carefully chosen beer and wine selections; now she's using her secret stash of cash to purchase hard liquor from stores around town, hiding the empties in her neighbors' recycling bins and leaving her cell phone at home so her controlling husband can't track her movements. In short, she's broken, trapped, and completely at a loss for how to save herself.

Leah is intrigued by McKenna's appearance at the liquor store, and follows her to a home as beautiful as her own in an eerily similar subdivision. She observes the oddly tense body language between McKenna and her husband, and watches McKenna's friends quickly excuse themselves from a patio gathering when her husband returns home. Leah grows convinced that McKenna's relationship is on a similar trajectory to her own. Soon she's regularly parking her car on the street behind McKenna's home, observing her life through a wide-open back window and hoping to be proven wrong. When, after witnessing an intense argument, Leah calls 911 only to watch McKenna's husband sweet-talk his way out of police intervention, she knows she needs to take drastic action before this stranger's marriage grows as toxic and violent as her own.

Readers of Nora Murphy's novel, which, for at least the first half, alternates between Leah's and McKenna's points of view, will soon recognize just how striking the parallels between these two women's lives are. Leah's a former lawyer, McKenna's a doctor — both are forced out of their chosen professions to focus solely on domesticity. Both used to have vibrant social lives until their husbands took those away too. Leah has clearly hit rock bottom, and readers see just how quickly that happened through a skillful series of recent flashbacks that illustrate where Leah started just a few months earlier and how completely she's fallen apart since then.

Murphy, a lawyer who has studied intimate-partner violence, effectively illustrates how even the most high-achieving people can find their self-confidence and their freedom eroded bit by bit at the hands of a manipulative and controlling spouse. She also starkly shows the lengths to which someone might be driven to escape such a situation — or to help someone else do so.

The Favor is propulsive and morally compelling, particularly once Detective Jordan Harrison comes on the scene to investigate the crimes at the novel's center. It turns out that he might, in fact, have his own reasons for choosing to look the other way as he starts to suspect the missing links between two seemingly unrelated murders. Will he choose to uphold the responsibilities of his profession, even if his emotions get in the way? And is there ever a justification for killing, even if it's not exactly self-defense? Though Murphy's novel lacks the plot twists seasoned readers of thrillers might be expecting, it nevertheless offers plenty to chew on and debate. The author helpfully provides a list of resources for those experiencing intimate-partner violence, since sadly enough, even though this thriller is a work of fiction, it's based on a problem that's all too real.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2022, and has been updated for the May 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.