Cristina Alger

Girls Like Us by Cristina Alger is a G.P. Putnam's Sons publication.

Another winner for Christina Alger!!

FBI agent, Nell Flynn is having a hard go of it, lately. Her career is teetering on the edge because she is avoiding the necessary therapy required to return to work after killing a man and taking a bullet in the line of duty. Then her father, from whom she is estranged, dies in a motorcycle accident, forcing her to return home to plan his funeral and get his estate in order.

But, when an show more old friend, who happens to be a homicide detective, asks Nell to quietly advise him with the investigation of two murdered women, she agrees to help. However, the case takes a twisted, horrifying turn when the evidence points to her own father as the prime suspect.

Wow. This book is a real mind-bender. The atmosphere is thick enough to slice with a knife, creating a palpable sense of dread. The murder investigation delves into topics that feel like an eerie premonition of current headlines. The author did an amazing job bringing key issues to the forefront in a realistic, eye-opening manner. Nell’s character is extremely well-drawn and her first -person narrative is haunting and quite effective.

I was sucked into the story immediately and sat on pins and needles from beginning to end. Although one can see where the story is probably headed, there are some truly shocking twists and big reveals that took me completely by surprise. The suspense builds to a near fever pitch, then hits you with a gut-wrenching sucker punch to the emotions. I love it when a book holds me firmly in its grip the way this one did.

Overall, this is a solid page-turning thriller!! show less

It should have been so simple. FBI agent Nell Flynn hasn’t seen her father in 10 years when she gets news he died in a motorcycle accident. All she has to do is return to Long Island, scatter his ashes & put the house up for sale. Poor Nell…she has no idea her visit will make her rethink everything she thought she knew about about her family & friends.

Nell is on medical leave due to events around her last case. Being back in her childhood home lifts the lid on a lot of memories & show more that’s amplified when her father’s colleagues begin to drop by. Martin Flynn was a cop & these men were his brothers in blue. Nell’s mother died young & she’s known most of them since she was a kid. Among them is Lee Davis, an old school friend & her dad’s last partner. And he has a favour to ask.

The body of a young woman has just been found. The MO is not only disturbing but eerily reminiscent of a case her father was working on when he died. Lee is well aware Nell works with the Behavioural Analysis Unit & wants her to visit the crime scene to see if she has any insight to share.

That should have been the end of it. But Nell’s innate curiosity & need for answers kicks in & soon she’s spending more time investigating than dealing with her father’s estate. Picking away at the dead woman’s life leads her to information that turns her world upside down. As she hunts for a suspect, witness statements & other evidence keep pointing to the same person….her father.

There are many threads in this book & it’s better you go in without any more hints from me. An intricate plot & well developed characters combine for a thought provoking read with plenty of surprises. I read this author’s previous work ( ) & found this slower with decidedly darker tones that I enjoyed.

The story is just as much about Nell’s past as it is about the present. There are long passages interspersed throughout that reveal various vignettes from her childhood. They help us understand her relationship with her parents & why Nell left when she was 18. But I did find this frustrating at times as it slowed the pace & any building tension was snuffed each time the current story line was interrupted. They inform the present to some extent but fewer of them would pack the same punch & even out the book’s flow. It would also provide more space for the ending. The pace picks up at warp speed with many elements wrapped up at once but instead of “being there” while it all went down, we’re only told about them after the fact.

But what these passages did very well is illuminate how our memories are influenced by time & circumstances. Things you remember from childhood can take on a different spin when revisited as an adult. Experience gives us the tools to see more angles & like Nell, you might be left wondering what was real.

I really liked Nell. She’s smart, confident & fearless. She may have had a rocky past with her father but he’s still her Dad. She’s a daughter who doesn’t want to acknowledge where the clues lead but she’s also an FBI agent who can’t ignore evidence. It’s one thing to not really like your father, quite another to accept the possibility he’s a killer. Either way, Nell decides she has to know & her desire for the truth ends up changing the lives of everyone involved. If this is the start of a series, I’d gladly tag along on her next adventure. show less

In Christina Alger's "ripped from the headlines" debut novel, the reader is taken on a whirlwind experience of the life of the disgustingly rich and powerful at the height of the financial crisis. With multiple points of view, one can get full insight into everyone impacted by such scandals and politics involved. While the topic is undoubtedly timely, one cannot help but feel it is a bit too soon for such stories, especially when the main characters are in the top 1 percent of the nation.

The show more entire success of The Darlings hinges on the fact that the reader will like and feel sympathy for all involved, from Paul and Merrill to Carter and Ines down to the family lawyer and those involved at the SEC. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to feel sympathy towards any family members who are trying to save their fortunes and deflecting the blame on anyone but themselves. The entire situation is extremely disturbing and shows the inequalities that exist between the haves and the have-nots.

In addition to the story itself, what prevents The Darlings from being enjoyable is the fact that the story itself is told from too many points of view. Not only does one get Paul's viewpoint, one also gets Merrill's, Ines', Carter's, two people from the SEC, two journalists, and the lawyer's as well. It becomes quite a chore keeping track of all of them, much less maintaining a steady and understandable storyline. One cannot get a good feel for any character, let alone keep track of who is telling what part of the story.

Just when one thinks it can get any worse, anyone familiar with the TV show, Dirty Sexy Money, will find one too many coincidences to believe that Ms. Alger was not heavily influenced by the series. From the family name - the Darlings, including a character named Tripp - to the family issues to the fact that the main character is the family general counsel - it all becomes a bit too much. In fact, having been a fan of the series, it was difficult to not think of one while reading the other.

Overall, The Darlings has too many strikes against it to be considered a decent read. It is still early in the economy's recovery, and the number of people still struggling to maintain a decent standard of living in the aftermath of the financial crisis and mortgage upheaval is great. Combine that with a strikingly similar backstory to a show on television and fairly poor storytelling in the form of too many points of view, and The Darlings are less darling and more sickening. It is difficult to enjoy a story about the wealthy one percent, their involvement in Ponzi schemes to make more money, and their fear about losing everything when so many people continue to suffer.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to NetGalley and to the Penguin Group for my e-galley! show less

My thoughts: Going into this novel, I knew one thing: Bravo bought it and is creating a scripted series around it. I expected a soapy and fun tale of a Ponzi scheme gone wrong. I got that, but I was surprised how good Alger's writing was and how funny and astute her descriptions and observations were:
"He dressed as he did--Nantucket reds and bow ties and hunting jackets--without irony. He played lacrosse and drank his way through college, never doubting that a spot in the Morgan Stanley show more Investment Banking program would be available to him upon graduation (it was), and after that, a job at his wife's father's hedge fund."
During the first fifty pages, I was gleefully laughing at Alger's descriptions of these upper crusters:
"There's practically no floral budget," Ines declared when she had been named committee chairwoman. "We'll have to get creative. Opulence is out, anyway." She wasn't lamenting; Ines simply stated unpleasant facts with a sort of stoic fortitude."
Alger gets this world: she's a lawyer, a former analyst, and her father is a Wall Street financier, yet this novel has a delightful outsider feel because the reader sees this world through the eyes of Paul. He lives in this world, and his marriage to Merrill is a delightfully authentic love story, but he's from North Carolina and observes things as an outsider in many ways. Interestingly, so does Merrill. Unlike her sister Lily, who was never the smart one, Merrill enjoys her demanding job and has the ability (and braveness) to question the assumptions of the life in which she was raised.

As much as I laughed at the station of the rich in this novel, it was funny because Alger's humor is an intelligent and thoughtful one:
"The Darlings of new York." Ines loved to reference "the article" in casual conversation, and she spoke of Duncan Sander as though they were old friends. In truth, it wasn't really an article, but more of a blurb attached to a glossy photograph of Ines and Lily, inexplicably attired in white cocktail dresses, frolicking on the front lawn with Bacall, the family Weimaraner."
I'm not particularly drawn to financial thrillers, and while this novel qualifies, it is very much a character-based novel. There aren't easy answers or obvious bad people. Each character is well-crafted, complex, and driven by motivations that the reader can understand. Alger makes the complex world of financial accounting simple and fascinating.

Favorite passage: "Manhattan was a Darwinian environment: only the strongest survived. The weak, the nice, the naive, the ones who smiled at passersby on the sidewalk, all got weeded out. They would come to New York for a few years after college, rent shoebox apartments in Hell's Kitchen or Murray Hill, work at a bank or wait tables or audition for bit parts in off-off-Broadway productions. They would meet other twenty-somethings over after-work drinks at soulless bars in midtown; get laid; get their hearts broken. They would feel themselves becoming impatient, jaded, cynical, rude anxious, neurotic. They would give up. They would opt out. They would scurry back to their hometowns or to the suburbs or secondary cities like Boston or D.C. or Atlanta, before they had had a chance to breed."

The verdict: The Darlings is a delightful modern novel about life, love, loyalty and taking chances. Alger grounds her characters in the financial crisis and a Ponzi scheme, but ultimately this novel is a character-driven page-turner about how and why we make choices in difficult situations.

Rating: 5 out of 5 show less