How Can I Help You is one of the most suspenseful books I’ve read in quite a while!
Based on the summary and length of the book, I expected a small mystery without much else in terms of characterization and plot. However, this book exceeded every expectation I placed upon it. Both narrators are well rounded and you spend the whole book picking apart their flaws and falling into a love-hate relationship with both of them.
Be warned that it takes a few chapters to really get into it, but the ending and resolution is so well crafted you don’t have the ability to stop reading until the very last page.
As a huge Harlan Coben fan, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, and would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good thriller/suspense novel.
Purchase your copy here.
Back Cover Copy of How Can I Help You:
No one knows Margo’s real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality, and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges.
That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo’s subtly sinister edge, and watches her carefully. When a patron’s death in the library bathroom gives her a hint of Margo’s mysterious past, Patricia can’t resist digging deeper—even as this new fixation becomes all-consuming.
Taut and compelling, How Can I Help You explores the dark side of human nature and the dangerous pull of artistic obsession as these “transfixing dual female narrators” (Kimberly McCreight) hurtle toward a stunning climax.
About Laura Sims:
Laura Sims is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Looker, now in development for television with Emily Mortimer’s King Bee Productions, eOne, and HBO Max. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Electric Lit, Gulf Coast, and more. She and her family live in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a reference librarian and hosts the library’s lecture series.
