Buzz Kill: 2 (Jane and Lila Pool)

When the shadowy circumstances of a relative's death are brought to light, Jane and Lila are plunged into the recesses of an underground drug operation with links to a burgeoning fascist movement in this thrill ride from the author of Broken River.

The Pool sisters have gone into business together: a down-home, if unequal, PI enterprise. But then Lila receives a shocking piece of news from an old friend of their Aunt Ruth's: their aunt's suicide more than a decade earlier might not have been what it seemed. A lawyer, she had represented a disgraced chemist working on a dangerous synthetic opioid. But once the client, Travis Nutt, was poised to lose, he went rogue and unleashed the adulterant as a street drug, in conjunction with a shadowy cartel. Can the twins solve the mystery of their aunt's death and bring this cultlike billionaire to justice?

Meanwhile, Jane has been invited to attend a writers' conference, an outlet she relishes until her dangerously confessional prose is seen by the wrong eyes. Her teenage daughter, Chloe, becomes the victim of a deepfake video while campaigning for class president and aggressively pursues the instigators, unaware of the muscle behind them. And old Harry, Jane's father, has stumbled upon a piece of unknown history that opens an unexpected door.

Buzz Kill is a rambunctious, kinetic, elastically braided narrative of a ride that shows J. Robert Lennon is at the height of his powers.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections, Pieces For The Left Hand and See You in Paradise, and eight novels, including Mailman, Castle, Familiar, Broken River, and most recently, Hard Girls. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Playboy, Granta, The Paris Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, and he lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches writing at Cornell University.