The Hand That Feeds You: A Novel

Creepy! Also a bit implausible and somewhat frustrating. Morgan Prager is writing her master's thesis in forensic psychology about the profile of violent crime victims and a potential symbiotic relationship with their predators. Then she becomes one. She returns home from work one day to find that her fiance Bennett has been mauled to death by her three shelter-rescue dogs (2 of whom are pit-bulls). Then she finds out that Bennett was not at all who he said he was. He had given her a false name and identity and had also tricked several other women in the same way and essentially collected all these women and strung them along, promising marriage. Given that Morgan met him online when he answered a research query for her thesis, you show more would think she might've seen this coming. Also, she hooks up with several other men in the course of the story in dangerous situations -- bars, pool halls and seems to invite the behavior she is intending to study. One stable force in her life is her brother Steven, a lawyer for a non-profit who connects her to Laurence McKenzie, an animal rights' attorney. With Bennett's identity in question, Morgan now questions if her dogs were the perpetrators or if at the very least they were provoked by Bennett who never liked them to begin with. Two of the 3 are still alive and in custody as evidence. When visiting the animal shelter, Morgan meets a woman named Billie who is kind to her and her dogs and becomes a companion and a convenient advocate of the whole investigation. As things progress it is clear that Bennett (aka Jimmy Gordon) was not the victim but Morgan is and is still in danger. You can probably guess 2 trajectories without any more info or spoilers. Hard to swallow on lots of levels. show less

The Hand That Feeds You by A.J. Rich (Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment) is a recommended psychological thriller.

The last thing 30 year old Morgan Prager, a student completing her thesis on victim psychology, expected to find when she came home from class was her fiance Bennett mauled to death in her apartment. She sees her dogs, Cloud, a Great Pyrenees she has raised from a puppy, and two pit bulls she has rescued, covered in blood and it seems obvious that they are to blame. Morgan, fearful her dogs may decide to attack her, locks herself in the bathroom and calls 911. Then she completely falls apart. When the police arrive they shoot one pit bull and take Cloud and the other dog into custody. Morgan is sent to Bellevue.

After a few days at show more Bellevue, Morgan is able to talk to a psychiatrist and answer some questions from the police. Apparently Morgan met Bennett while working on her thesis. He responded to a profile she set up on a dating site to test a theory about victims of sexual predators. As Morgan slowly recovers, it becomes clear that Bennett was not the man she thought he was. First, his parents do not live where he claimed they did and what he shared about his life and occupation to Morgan were lies. What is even more disturbing is that Bennett was engaged to two other women and one of them was recently murdered. While Morgan works with Mackenzie, an animal advocacy lawyer, to try to save her remaining two dogs, she also tries to figure out Bennett's real identity.

The Hand That Feeds You starts out at a gallop with the gruesome murder and Morgan's breakdown. Then the action slows and there is a lot of information downloads presented in the story. The extra information on sociopaths, psychopaths and their victims is interesting. All the dog talk was interesting too (mainly because I have a soft spot for Great Pyrenees and adopting shelter dogs). Sometimes, oddly enough, the slower pace results in a laundry list of what Morgan decides to eat and drink. I know we all need to eat and drink, but there is such a thing as too much information. I can understand her picking up a bottle of water from a vendor and contemplating her next move, I don't really care if she was hungry, decided not to eat a hot dog, grabbed a bottle of water and gave the street vendor $2 for it and then he demanded $3.

This is a great airplane book. The opening is going to hook you and keep you reading. Even with all the extra information, I did want to keep reading to see who Bennett really was and if the dogs would be okay. Morgan isn't really an especially compelling protagonist and I didn't connect with her at all. The surprising twist at the end will likely not be a really big surprise to most readers, but it does provide a satisfying conclusion.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Scribner for review purposes. show less

A good airplane read but otherwise pretty disappointing. The author, A.J. Rich, is actually Jill Ciment and Amy Hempel-two writers whose other work I like a lot. Apparently they joined forces on an unfinished manuscript by their friend Kathy Rich, who died in 2012. And the premise is a good one, with a youngish student of victimology who rescues dogs finding out, thanks to a gruesome murder, that she has been something of a targeted victim herself. But the writing just doesn't flow. It's clunky, and a bit show-offy with specifics: contemporary song titles and bad jokes and places in Brooklyn and psychology studies, just trying to cram in too much STUFF. That, and then the reveal at the end just goes limp. I am honestly mystified as to show more how two accomplished writers could go so tone-deaf on this one, unless they had a really bad editor. show less

Morgan Prager’s world is quite sunny: she is busy finishing her thesis on the psychology of victims and she is newly-engaged to charming but secretive Bennett Vaux-Trudeau. She returns to her apartment one afternoon to find her world unexpectedly upended: Bennett has been mauled to death and her three dogs are covered in his blood. How could the gentle dogs she rescued be capable of such violence?

When Morgan decides to break the news to Bennett’s parents in person, she discovers that everything she thought she knew about the man is a lie. Her attempts to learn more about her fiancé lead to several disturbing discoveries. Now certain she has become one of the victims she’s spent so much time studying, Morgan begins to wonder what show more actually happened in her apartment the day Bennett died. Exactly how were her dogs involved in the horrific attack? And when the women who were involved with Bennett begin to die, Morgan finds herself in a race to find the truth before her own life is forfeit.

Unfortunately, Morgan’s idiosyncrasies seem like a catalogue of isolated [and often strange] behaviors that never quite come together to create a protagonist that feels real, hindering the development of any empathetic connection with her character or her situation. The narrative does not always flow smoothly; nevertheless, there are enough twists and turns to give the tale an edge. Astute readers will unravel the not-so-mysterious mystery long before the final reveal but the pieces of the story surrounding the dogs will keep those pages turning. show less

The story requires a bit too much stretching of the line of what's believable to really work, and leaves off with a bit too many questions. Plus, I saw the ending coming way before the big reveal played out, which is always kind of disappointing. That said, it was engaging enough to keep me reading, has an opening scene that is honestly quite gripping (and disturbing), and is definitely a new take on a somewhat old story idea. So, still worth a read, though I am legitimately upset now about the dogs and everything.

Man... Ok, so I only read this book for the Popsugar Reading Challenge, as one of the prompts is a book by two authors and I didn't want to use a non-fic option. But this looked quite promising, so I was excited about it. It didn't live up to expectations. Good points first - it's fast paced and quite fun (if you excuse the man-eaten-by-dogs thing), and I found the psychology stuff that gets thrown in quite interesting. But the writing wasn't amazing, the ending wasn't too hard to figure out and the main character in particular seemed to lack a lot of emotion. And actually, I think that was my main issue with this book - it's a bit flat, considering the topic and events in it. Nothing gripped me, nothing made my pulse race, nothing show more surprised me. And I don't think any book needs more than one scene where a woman has a pee under strange circumstances... show less

Well-written & creepy strange story of a Ph.D. grad student losing her dogs and her lover. Did the dogs do it? And who was he, anyway? She studies victimology here, but is she also one of several? Compare and contrast this (dog as cause of death) with The Dogs of Babel (dog as witness to death). Sensitively written for animal lovers, surprise ending. Nice.