📚 The Divide 👍👍
My friend Morgan Richter's first mainstream novel, The Divide, came out in hardback a year ago (and just recently in paperback- perfect for late summer vacation reading!), but I was slow on the uptick and only got around to reading it in the last week or so 1. I've been a big fan of Morgan's work since her first self-published novel, Bias Cut, way back in 2012. The Divide has a lot of familiar elements from Morgan's earlier efforts, but the premise of this one is completely unique and hooked me immediately.
Jenny St. John is our down-on-her-luck protagonist, a failed actress scraping by in Los Angeles as a psychic life coach. Things start out grim when she's immediately linked to a murder investigation, but in scrappy fashion, she soon finds a way to leverage circumstances to her benefit. The dilemma is that her highly tenuous opportunity is the direct result of the mysterious murder of a two-decades-past fling, and oh, yeah, his missing ex-wife is not only a suspect, but Jenny's doppelganger.
The wild noir premise of The Divide is incredibly fun, and the twists and turns that followed do not disappoint and kept me guessing until the end. They're not the reason I feel like Morgan completely leveled up on this one, though. I've always found her other mystery/thrillers entertaining and well-executed, but The Divide offers layers of thematic depth beyond the page-turning plots of her past novels. And those layers stuck with me even after I finished reading the final page. The divide between Gen-X/Millenials and Gen-Z, success and failure, paths not taken, and selling versus selling out are just some of the thematic elements deftly woven throughout the narrative. I found them completely relatable and highly relevant to my middle-aged experience in 20252. The Divide delivers as a unique noir thriller that starts with a bang, settles into an intriguing mystery, and then ratchets up the tension as Jenny's world begins to completely fall apart.
I'm waiting for Mary to finish my copy of Morgan's newest book, The Understudy, an opera thriller, set in New York City, that just came out at the beginning of August.↩
The Divide has additional personal resonance with me that's completely tangential to the story itself. Morgan and I were middle school classmates in Social Studies and English in both 7th and 8th grade. We were on friendly terms by the end of eighth grade, but didn't really hang out outside of class. More importantly, I didn't know her well enough to fully realize that we shared a lot of common interests that could have developed into a cool friendship. Instead, just when I might have figured this out and made an effort to get to know her better, we headed off to rival high schools on Spokane's South Hill and settled into the activities and friend groups of our respective schools. Despite being separated by only a few miles geographically during our four years of high school, I didn't interact with Morgan in any meaningful way after that until nearly twenty years later, when we lived on opposite ends of the West Coast. Thankfully, connecting with Morgan again didn't involve a mysterious murder or an evil twin, just the unifying power of the internet before the social media apocalypse. Somewhere around 2008/2009 I stumbled across Morgan's now-defunct Preppies of the Apocalypse blog, and started nerding out in the comments section with a small community of internet friends over our shared enjoyment of NBC's Heroes and other popular shows from that era. Thank goodness for the open web and real-life second chances!↩