The Substitute

June 26, 2017
Warren Botts, a substitute teacher in a small unnamed Canadian town, is suspected of murder in this sly and clever thriller from Lundrigan (The Widow Tree). He discovers the victim, Amanda Fuller, a 13-year-old girl in one of his classes, hanging from a tree in his backyard. His shocked phone call to 911 and odd responses to the operator’s questions only further implicate him. Botts is socially awkward to begin with, and his scattered reaction to Amanda’s death makes readers wonder if he really is that way or if he is just an unreliable character in a third-person narrative. There’s also another first-person narrator, someone who seems to know all the secrets. Lundrigan’s use of the two alternating narrative styles deepens the suspense. This slow-burning thriller can be a bit too slow at times, weighed down by description, and beginning the story with the discovery of a dead teenage girl is an overused trope. Nevertheless, this book will keep readers guessing, and, for the most part, they’ll be surprised by how it all plays out. Agent: Hilary McMahon, Westwood Creative Artists.

May 15, 2017
The violent death of one of his middle school students in his own largely unexplored backyard opens gaping wounds in the life of a substitute teacher.Warren Botts, who's already embraced biology as a respite from the numbers that crowded his head when he studied physics, has taken a year to step away from the ivory tower to work in a school whose principal is his academic adviser's brother. His search for a peaceful life ends the morning he finds Amanda Fuller, a troubled eighth-grade pupil who'd approached him more than once looking for help in her studies, hanging from a tree outside his house. The shock of his discovery awakens Warren's painful memories of his father's own death by hanging. And his troubles deepen when Detective Jennifer Reed, piqued by his ineffectual denials that he'd known the girl outside class, anoints Warren her prime suspect. Lundrigan (The Widow Tree, 2014, etc.) methodically alternates chapters tracing Warren's deepening woes with a first-person narrative by the schemer who was actually responsible for Amanda's death. As the two stories progress, they intertwine ever more deeply. Both Warren and his opposite number are solitary souls who've had fraught relationships with their mothers; both find themselves uncomfortably close to wraithlike sisters (one of whom is dead, the other possibly imaginary); even Warren's nickname, "War," recalls warfarin, the poison the killer used in an earlier experiment in vengeance. Just when you're convinced that these two figures are joined root and branch, the author reveals the truth, which is more disturbing than anything you imagined. A feast for fans who miss Patricia Highsmith's and Margaret Millar's haunting anatomies of people as nice as pie except for their murders.

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Starred review from June 1, 2017
Canadian author Lundrigan's skillfully balanced blend of psychological thriller and haunting coming-of-age story is infused with creepy, small-town atmospheric suspense. When middle-school student Amanda Fuller is found hanged in substitute teacher Warren Botts' backyard, he instantly becomes the prime suspect. Making matters worse, Amanda was seen visiting Botts' home in the weeks before her death. When police find Botts' latest classroom test shoved in Amanda's mouth and realize that she was hung with an exact replica of the pulley system featured on the exam, Botts is suspended and faces the full force of the community's grief-filled rage. Nervous, socially awkward Botts is likable all the same, and his overwhelming confusion about Amanda's death points toward his innocence. But when his sister, Beth, a homeless heroin addict, shows up and reveals details about Warren's traumatic childhood, he begins to look all the better as the killer. Lundrigan's writing is both elegant and darkly humorous, delivering bare-knuckle social commentary that will appeal to fans of Gillian Flynn, Karin Fossum, and Laura Lippman.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)