Marguerite by the Lake

Starred review from April 15, 2025
Carter's second thriller is a searing contemporary take on Daphne du Maurier's classic neo-GothicRebecca. What unites Marguerite Gray and Phoenix Sullivan most closely is their shared love of Rosecliff, the Grays' 20-acre Connecticut estate, which lifestyle influencer Marguerite, who's been cut off from her old-money family's wealth, writes about ardently and influentially even though Phoenix, a member of Frank Brizzi's gardening crew, is the one who tends it most lovingly. The two women's symbiotic but profoundly unequal relationship is threatened by a series of escalating calamities. The first doesn't seem like a calamity: Phoenix saves ex-attorney Geoffrey Gray, Marguerite's husband and partner in the charity Greenhaven Gardens, from being crushed to death by a falling spruce tree. But then Geoffrey makes advances to Phoenix, slowly wears her down and takes her to bed, and fosters her undying love for him. Matters come to a head when a confrontation between Phoenix and Marguerite, who's grown steadily more suspicious of the gardener, ends with the lady of the manor plunging from a cliff. Geoffrey wastes no time in getting Phoenix to move in, and he's clearly ready to move on. But his staff isn't, and Taylor Gray, his razor-sharp law student daughter, also isn't. Nor, most movingly, is Phoenix herself, who's tormented by accusatory visions of Marguerite, conflicts real and imagined with everyone she turns to, and the crushing certainty that she's never going to be seen as a replacement or a legitimate successor to the first wife of her lover, who inevitably turns out to be hiding secrets of his own. Not to be missed, and definitely not to be imitated.

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Starred review from May 1, 2025
Phoenix, raised by her grandmother, took a job at a landscape-design company after high school, gradually embracing more responsibility, including designing gardens for some of the company's high-end clients. One such client is Marguerite Gray, who, with husband Geoffrey, owns Rosecliff, a magnificent estate with equally magnificent gardens that are Marguerite's pride and joy. Phoenix is shocked but delighted when she is invited to the launch party for Marguerite's new gardening book. But at the party, a terrible storm blows up, and a giant tree falls and would have killed Geoffrey if Phoenix hadn't pulled him out of the way. Marguerite is away the next time Phoenix is working at Rosecliff, and Geoffrey invites Phoenix to share a bottle of wine. The relationship escalates, and when a tragic accident occurs, and Marguerite is out of the picture, Phoenix moves in with Geoffrey. As things spiral out of control, awful secrets emerge, the sense of menace escalates, and Phoenix finds herself becoming increasingly paranoid, obsessed with a painting of Marguerite that seems to come alive. Readers will be mesmerized by the pulse-pounding suspense, dark twists, hypnotic plot, and cataclysmic ending of Carter's latest gothic thriller (after The Photographer, 2021).

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