Book Review: The Divide by Morgan Richter

Once upon a time, Jenny St. John was an aspiring actress with one excellent leading role credit to her name. That movie, unfortunately, was never released, though its director Serge Grumet would go on to find lasting fame in the film industry. Jenny, on the other hand, bounced from audition to audition before finally giving up and taking on a different acting role entirely: dispensing advice to clients as a (fake) psychic while hiding her struggle to make ends meet.

When a police officer drops in on her clinic one day, her entire world is turned upside down. Not because she’s busted as a fraud–she’s way too good at reading people for that–but because Detective Moreau comes bearing bad news. Serge is dead, having been murdered in his Malibu home, and his ex-wife Gena Santos has gone missing. More pertinently to Jenny’s life, Gena was the spitting image of her, even going so far as to claim that Jenny’s role in The Divide was actually hers and that that had been how she and Serge met in the first place. 

Jenny quickly proves to the detective that she and Gena are two entirely different people, even as she quietly seethes over this usurpation of the one big accomplishment of her life. Unable to help herself, she begins to poke into what happened to Serge and Gena, aided by Gena’s glamorous best friend, the Oscar-winning actress Boots Pontifex, who unreservedly believes in Jenny’s abilities. As well she should, for Jenny isn’t just your average con artist:

My favorite part of being a psychic–okay, yes, a fraudulent psychic–was getting the chance to solve puzzles. I loved digging beneath the surface of a client’s request and unearthing answers to the questions they hadn’t quite dared to put into words. I loved talking to people, thinking about them, figuring out what made them tick. I loved analyzing situations and behaviors, searching for anomalies and discovering logical explanations. I loved all of that, and I was good at it. Given enough time and freedom to snoop around and ask questions, I figured I could find Serge’s killer, and I could find Gena.

The more Jenny digs, though, the more disturbing parallels she finds between herself and the missing woman. Neither of them has ever been eager to talk about the past, but both had embraced creative pursuits, with Jenny’s unsuccessful foray into acting contrasting with Gena’s accomplishments as an artist. As Jenny enters Gena’s rarefied world, she’s further disoriented by her effect on Gena’s inner circle. Almost everyone who knew Gena is taken aback by Jenny’s resemblance to her, and had accepted without question that Gena had starred in The Divide. Now Jenny is shaking up their long-standing beliefs, inadvertently provoking a killer to strike again in the process

Even as she faces a deadly physical threat, Jenny must deal with the existential crisis that Gena has engendered in her psyche. For so long, the one bright spot in her life as she teetered just above the poverty line was the pride she could take in her biggest accomplishment to date. Now some strange woman has stolen that, in addition to living the life of creative success that Jenny has always wanted.

It’s so unusual to find a murder mystery novel that grapples so thoughtfully with these questions of fate, identity, and the paths not taken. Jenny is a very sympathetic narrator, smart but unlucky, regretful but also perhaps a little too hard on herself, especially in comparison to how forgiving she is of others:

It had made me feel shabby to realize I’d been one of many, that this was Serge’s well-documented modus operandi, that he apparently boinked his leading ladies and forgot about them as soon as the production had wrapped. All that aside, though, Serge had twice married age-appropriate women who had achieved substantial success in a field outside the entertainment industry. Maybe that mitigated his louche behavior, at least somewhat.

 

It’d be nice to think so. Because as much as I’d liked Serge at the time, as much as I still felt warmly toward him, as fantastic and life shaping an experience as filming The Divide had been, every once in a while I found it hard to shake off the nagging suspicion that maybe Serge was a bit of a sleazeball.

Jenny’s investigation into Serge’s murder and Gena’s disappearance forces her to reevaluate many things she thought she knew, about both herself and others. It makes for a gripping tale of LA noir, even if I didn’t already have a soft spot for wisecracking fake-psychic detectives. It’s also a surprisingly wistful examination of the way that certain decisions can cause our life paths to diverge. I don’t know if I necessarily loved the way that the speculative fiction twist was posited in the narrative–I didn’t find it of a tone with the rest of the novel–but I did very much like the idea. I hope we’ll get a chance to read more of Jenny’s adventures in future, despite the fact that this book doesn’t quite set up for a sequel. I just found her so endearing that I really want her to succeed.