Before you begin The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb (The Boy Who Went Away), know that the main characters are almost entirely unlikable. One is sociopathic con artist; the others, her victims, are more pathetic than sympathetic, and none of them are especially interesting. You should also know that in spite of this, The Face Thief is compulsively, irresistibly readable.
It opens as a woman--the con artist, beautiful and ruthless--takes a spectacular tumble down a marble staircase. As her head thuds against each step and she lies broken at the bottom of the stairs, Gottlieb wants you, his readers, to wonder how this happened. Did she fall or was she pushed? The tension in that question dissipates quickly as it becomes quite clear this woman had plenty of enemies, and just as many reasons to watch her back around staircases.
We know her as Margot. Her troubling past is revealed in pieces as she recovers in a hospital, where she is attended to by an unfathomably naive police detective named Dan France. Margot's more recent history, however, unfolds through two of her victims.
Lawrence Billings, a body-language expert who teaches people how to gain professional advantages through "face reading," takes Margot on as a student and finds his marriage destroyed as a result. The second, John Potash, is elaborately defrauded by her in a scheme that wipes out his family's considerable savings. Both men, caught and burned by Margot's seductive ways, are out for revenge.
It isn't difficult to figure out who is responsible for Margot's fall, so the book's page-turning urgency is a testament to Gottlieb's marvelous sense of suspense. He also has a flair for striking metaphors, especially where Margot is concerned: the cleft between her breasts is "like the notched sight of a rifle." She "stabbed a long polished fingernail onto the linen tablecloth and drew it toward her with the rising rasp of a zipper opening." She hazily remembers "kissing below a bowl of summer stars," and when Lawrence first sees her, she is "[emerging] from the darkness like a woman out of a lake."
These sensuous descriptions, contrasted with Lawrence's analytical observations ("tiny signs of asymmetric contraction around the eyes and mouth alerted him to the ambiguity of her pleasure"), elevate The Face Thief from a fairly banal thriller to a compelling, laudable novel. --Hannah Calkins
Shelf Talker: Armed with an unparalleled sex appeal and unburdened by a conscience, a dangerously manipulative woman tries to destroy the lives of two men in this gripping, cerebral thriller.