Lady X

In 1978, someone in New York started making predators disappear. Not arrested, not exposed in a column, just gone, in a decade when the city looked the other way as a matter of civic policy. Molly Fader builds a whole novel around the quiet arithmetic of that: who counts, who gets counted, who decides.

What it's about

The book runs on two tracks that keep circling each other. In the present, a wife starts pulling threads on her movie-star husband, the kind of man whose charm is a full-time job and whose secrets have been someone else's problem for years. Back in 1978, a vigilante is working the shadows of a grimy, glittering New York, hunting the men everyone else has agreed not to see. Fader keeps the connective tissue between the two timelines deliberately taut, so the fun is watching the past reach forward and put its hand on the present. It is a thriller with a moral engine, less interested in gore than in reckoning and the historical half does real work rather than serving as costume.

Why everyone's talking about it

Fader (who also writes as Molly O'Keefe) has a long track record of women-centered fiction that treats anger as a plot mechanism instead of a personality flaw. Lady X is the loudest expression of that yet. The pitch lands squarely for readers who liked the celebrity-machinery voyeurism of Daisy Jones, who love the cold precision of a Gillian Flynn narrator, who enjoy a revenge story that keeps its receipts. The 1970s New York setting is doing heavy lifting in the early buzz: sleazy, specific, a little feral. If you want a cozy mystery or a tidy romance threaded through the danger, this is not that book and the vigilante premise means the violence has a point of view rather than a warning label. Go in expecting sharp edges.

The verdict, for now

If a dual-timeline thriller with a feminist streak and a mean sense of justice sounds like your Saturday, this is an easy yes, with the movie-star hook giving it obvious crossover appeal. Wait if you prefer your thrillers gentle or your morality unambiguous, because Lady X is neither, on purpose. Either way, read it before someone at book club spoils which timeline breaks your heart first.

---