Cat & Mouse, and 90s Movie Cheese

L.R. Jones, You Look Beautiful Tonight: a Thriller

Meek Nashville librarian Mia Anderson has the life she wants, with a decent job, comfy apartment, and narrow network of good friends. It isn’t glamorous, but it works. But her BFF, who really is glamorous, pushes Mia to join a dating app. Online, a charming civil engineer named Adam makes it his personal project to uplift Mia and unlock her hidden potential. Too bad Mia doesn’t want unlocked, because Adam is willing to kill.

L.R. Jones has purportedly written several bestselling “dark” novels, but I can’t find them; this is apparently her first under this byline. This novel feels like the big-screen thrillers Joe Eszterhas wrote in the 1980s and 1990s, with hard-bitten characters pushed into corners and forced to reveal their secrets. Jones is less libidinous than the notoriously salacious Eszterhas, but she recaptures his texture. This is both good and bad.

Someone starts tucking anonymous notes for Mia under her morning latte, and in other places that show her secret admirer is close. This gives her conflicting impulses. She knows she ought to feel “stranger danger,” but the unanticipated attention also makes her feel validated, assured that her actions matter to somebody. She starts adjusting her behavior to receive her secret admirer’s approval. Her admirer, unfortunately, misreads Mia’s intentions.

Here’s where experienced thriller readers start compiling a suspect list, and testing it against the growing weight of evidence. But Jones offers us a cornucopia of possible suspects. Mia’s two best friends have begun acting squirrely, for instance, each in their own way. Mia also has two bosses who each conform to different stereotypes of why you can’t trust management. An enigmatic stranger has begun watching Mia at work.

Then there’s Adam. Mia hasn’t actually met him yet, only interacted with him online through the dating app and social media. He begins the relationship with the pickup artist’s trick of negging her. Mia initially sees through that. But Adam responds with an eloquent spiel about how he, too, was once chronically overlooked in today’s fast-paced and deeply inauthentic society. He only wants to help her escape her self-imposed shackles.

L.R. Jones

If this seems like a confusing cast of thousands, I won’t argue. Introducing all the moving parts in Mia’s life takes forever, giving this book an extremely long first act. Only somewhere around the halfway mark does Jones quit clearing her throat and begin the thrilling part of this supposed thriller. Though in fairness, once Jones begins moving, she begins moving hard. Her villain, once introduced, plays Mia like a fiddle.

Jones provides Mia with a remarkable antagonist. The enemy claims to value Mia’s well-being, and targets villainy at whatever prevents Mia living to the fullest. But the enemy also gives conflicting cues. “I want you to assert control in your own life,” the villain tells Mia, while simultaneously literally picking Mia’s wardrobe and scripting Mia’s interactions with the various people controlling her life.

We readers with our suspect lists start getting confused. The antagonist is intimately aware of Mia’s daily activities, and provides running commentary, while remaining strangely invisible. How, we wonder, can somebody be seemingly as close as Mia’s elbow in her workplace, social activities, and home, while remaining wholly unnoticed? Don’t worry, Mia notices this too, and her trajectory moves from horror to determination to paranoia.

Remember the Joe Eszterhas comparison? I don’t make that lightly. Jones creates a multi-layered story of distrust so complete that, like Eszterhas’ most famous movies, the resolution is almost certainly disappointing. It relies on characters keeping secrets, but not the ones they’ve let us believe they’re keeping. And, I cringe to write this. It relies on conflating mental illness and trauma with moral weakness.

I’m trying not to reveal too much because, when Jones’ narrative works, it works well. Audiences who love character-driven thrillers will appreciate plenty herein. But in the final resolution (and extremely talky denouement), Jones reveals an Eszterhas-like belief that humans will inevitably repeat the mistakes of their past, unless compelled to change through violence. Jones hints at that in earlier chapters, but her resolution makes it explicit.

Again, the right audience will appreciate Jones’ story. It’s character-driven rather than shocking, and nearly all the violence occurs offscreen. The appeal isn’t violent horror, but the paranoia and self-doubt Mia experiences as she, like her audience, struggles to reconcile the conflicting evidence. But the culmination is so thoroughly unmoored from anything that came before, that I fear experienced readers will sit in disbelief and, like me, throw the book.