What I'm Reading: Mallory Arnold's 'Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die'
Last year, I came across Mallory Arnold's How to Survive a Horror Story and was immediately drawn to its tale of writers trapped in a mansion, competing to inherit the fortune of a deceased horror author who was a fan of riddle-driven, Saw -like traps. The novel is a delightful take on the locked-room mystery, with a cast of flawed characters getting knocked off one by one in grisly fashion. Now, Arnold is putting her twist on the well-trodden Woman-Scorned-Gets-Revenge story in Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die , tripling the drama with three female narrators who live in the same Montana town and discover they've all been dating the same man, Jason, a swindling jerk with enough red flags to recreate a USSR rally. Nora is the athletic one, a track-and-field coach with daddy issues. Cham is the rough-around-the-edges mechanic who falls for Jason's organ-donor con. And Ruby is the privileged schoolteacher with a shady past that somehow figures into the horror that unfolds ...
