Beware the Woman

Jacy and her husband, Jed, take a celebratory road trip to his childhood home in northern Michigan before their baby arrives. Jed’s father, a courtly retired physician who seems to adore Jacy, offers care, stories, and old-fashioned hospitality. But after a frightening bleed and an unsettling visit to a local doctor, the warmth curdles into control: decisions are made for Jacy, phone lines die, doors lock, and the woods press close. As Jacy pieces together what really happened to Jed’s mother decades ago, every tenderness starts to look like a trap. Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman is a taut, breath-held thriller about power, inheritance, and the ferocity of a mother-to-be who refuses to be hunted.

• Listeners who love gothic-tinged domestic thrillers with sharp feminist teeth
• Fans of tense, character-driven suspense set in vivid places
• Book clubs ready to talk about control, consent, and family myths

Megan Abbott is the award-winning author of eleven novels, including The Turnout, Give Me Your Hand, The Fever, Dare Me, and You Will Know Me. A scholar of noir and a deft chronicler of female ambition and peril, her work blends propulsive plots with psychological precision. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, and cocreated the series Dare Me for television. She lives in New York City.