Not So Perfect Strangers

by L.S. Stratton

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

What happens when two people are "mad as hell" and aren't going to take it anymore? What happens when they strike a deal? This taut thriller puts you in each of their shoes. Making the suspense twice the fun!

One fateful encounter upends the lives of two women in this tense domestic thriller, a modern spin on Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train that flips the script on race and gender politics.
 
“I’m a big believer that women should help each other, Tasha,” she says. “Don’t you think?”

Tasha Jenkins has finally found the courage to leave her abusive husband. Taking her teenage son with her, Tasha checks into a hotel the night before their flight out of D.C. and out of Kordell Jenkins’s life forever. But escaping isn’t so easy, and Tasha soon finds herself driving back to her own personal hell. As she is leaving, a white woman pounds on her car window, begging to be let in. Behind the woman, an angry man is in pursuit. Tasha makes a split-second decision that will alter the course of her life: she lets her in and takes off. 
 
Tasha and Madison Gingell may have very different everyday realities, but what they have in common is marriages they need out of. The two women want to help each other, but they have very different ideas of what that means . . .
 
They are on a collision course that will end in the case files of the D.C. MPD homicide unit. Unraveling the truth of what really happened may be impossible—and futile. Because what has the truth ever done for women like Tasha and Madison?

Master of psychological suspense L. S. Stratton has written a gripping murder mystery about two perfect strangers whose lives become dangerously entangled, a must-read for fans of crime thriller books.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781454947431
Publisher:	Union Square & Co.
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	12,621
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

L.S. Stratton is an NAACP Image Award-nominated author and former crime newspaper reporter who has written more than a dozen books under different pen names in just about every genre from thrillers to romance to historical fiction. She currently lives in Maryland with her husband, their daughter, and their tuxedo cat.

Editorial Reviews

01/23/2023

At the start of this overly ambitious thriller from Stratton, a pseudonym for romance author Shelly Ellis (the Gibbons Gold Digger series), 36-year-old Tasha Jenkins flees a burning Washington, D.C., house and reports the fire to 911, only later to confess to a firefighter that she set the blaze. Flashbacks introduce Madison Gingell, whose house will be burned down, apparently by Tasha. Both women are in unhappy marriages, and after a chance encounter Madison suggests they kill each other’s spouses as a way of both freeing themselves and avoiding being charged with murder. Maryland police detective Clayton Simmons suspects Tasha didn’t set the fire and wonders why she confessed to doing so. During an interview with Tasha, when Clayton reveals that a man and woman were found shot in the Gingell home, Tasha reacts with surprise. Multiple other twists compensate only in part for underdeveloped characters. Readers interested in a better riff on Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train plot would be better served by Larry Beinhart’s The Deal Goes Down. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A Book Riot Best Mystery & Thriller of 2023

“What Stratton does is take our assumptions and turns them upside down. NOT SO PERFECT STRANGERS is a thrilling read with much to consider about marriage, prejudice, abuse and parenting.” —The Book Reporter

“In addition to being a really good read, Not So Perfect Strangers is a smart criticism of the intersections of race, patriarchy, and privilege.” —Book Riot

"Not So Perfect Strangers is a gripping, twisted ride! You think you know what’s happening, but you don’t. Chock full of surprises, this dark story unfolds perfectly right up to the last page."
—Samantha Downing, #1 International Bestselling author of For Your Own Good. 

"I was delighted to be caught in the crosshairs of this deliciously devious cat-and-mouse game between two strikingly different, but equally magnetic women as they duked it out for justice, revenge, love, and power. This one keeps the reader guessing until the very end."
—Chandler Baker, New York Times bestselling author of Whisper Network

From the Publisher