The Hand That Feeds You. Collaboration, however, is a far more difficult prospect for writers than artists whose disciplines all more or less demand the presence and input of others. Sure you can write, record, and engineer your solo album in your home studio if you really, really want to — but try making a feature-length movie without actors or a director of photography, or staging a play without a set or lights or a score. In , she quit her job as a magazine editor, moved to Rajasthan, India, and spent a year in the city of Udaipur, freelancing and becoming fluent in Hindi.
Several years ago, the writer Katherine Russell Rich made an alarming discovery about a man she had fallen in love with. His messages revealed a shadow life, refracted through layers of deception. He was living with another woman and seeing several others on the side.
Rich quickly ended the relationship and started writing a novel about it. She never got past the first chapter. But two of her closest friends, Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment, decided to tell it for her. Ciment, 62, has published five literary novels, including Act of God and Heroic Measures. Hempel, 63, is an acclaimed short-story writer whose work has been compared to that of Alice Munro and Grace Paley.
Neither had ever written a mystery or a thriller. The protagonist of the novel is a woman named Morgan Prager, who at 30 seems to have a bright future ahead of her. In a quick brutal delivery of literary justice, Bennett presumably unlike his real-life low-life antecedent is dead by the end of the first chapter. She locks herself in the bathroom and manages to call , though she can hardly speak to the dispatcher. The cops end up shooting the pit named Chester; Cloud, her Pyrenees, and George, the other fostered pit, are both taken away by animal control.
Prager herself is taken to Bellevue. Nobody seems to know that Bennett was in New York, or notice that he has died. His body stays at the morgue, unclaimed, while Prager tries to figure out just who the hell he was, what exactly happened to him, and more urgently yet: what happened — or is happening — to her.
