Pun Salad

Poor Hannah! She's happily married to Owen, and her biggest problem is a rocky relationship with her husband's bratty teenage daughter, Bailey. Hannah's a "woodturner", making a decent living thanks to her prowess with lathes. They all live on a houseboat in Sausalito. And then it all turns quickly to shit, when the software company Owen writes code for gets revealed to have seriously misled investors about its revolutionary upcoming product, which turns out to be vaporware. (Think Theranos, except the CEO with a reality distortion field is a guy.)

Owen vanishes, leaving only an enigmatic two-word message for Hannah: "Protect her." Oh, and a duffel bag full of wads of cash. Could those wads be ill-gotten? And soon it's revealed that the man she knew as Owen had a biography that was pretty nearly completely made up. Hannah must navigate between the competing demands of FBI agents investigating the company and an obviously-knows-more-than-he's-telling US Marshal (who could have been, but wasn't, played by Timothy Olyphant in the miniseries).

The only clues about Owen's past life are from Bailey, who has dim memories of Austin Texas. Hannah and Bailey take off to Austin where they turn out to be a pretty good detective team. Although their investigation seems like it might imperil Owen's request about protecting Bailey.

Now, this is definitely a chick book. (A "Reese's Book Club" emblem on the cover.) (That's Reese Witherspoon.) But it was a definite page-turner for me. The only irritation was Hannah's narration; she keeps babbling her inner monologue, telling rather than showing her inner fears and conflicts. I found myself fast-forwarding over those passages.