“The Good Life is absolutely unputdownable.”

“The Good Life moves us stealthily, winningly, alarmingly, through the life of a lucky, wealthy young family and the terrifying and painful things that happen to them. This is a page-turner of a special type: gimlet-eyed, compassionate, wittily observant, and unflinching. Marian Thurm knows people, knows New York and knows noir.”

“On the very first page, Thurm ignites the engine of her plot when Roger Goldenhar, a commercial real estate developer on a family vacation in Florida, secretly buys a semiautomatic pistol. The Good Life could almost be an illustration of the Chekhovian dictum that a gun introduced in the first act must be fired before the curtain falls, as the reader avidly turns the pages, eager to discover which violent solution Roger will choose as a means of escaping his financial and personal distress…He believes the pistol points toward the only way out, though Thurm’s ending nonetheless provides a stark and chilling surprise.”

“In this arresting psychological portrait of an obsessive husband and an ineffectual wife, Thurm dissects the lives of Roger and Stacy Goldenhar, a couple who make their home in Manhattan, where they were born in the same hospital on the same day ten years apart…The outcome will catch most readers by surprise.”

“Thurm creates memorable and vividly realistic scenes…Well written, tense…Recommended for fans of authors such as Laura Lippman and Megan Abbott.”

“Thurm, a master of the short story, can delineate characters decisively in a few strokes, and she establishes Stacy, who works for paltry wages at a nonprofit, as a foil for Roger’s material standards. But the real coup here is making domestic fiction into breathtaking suspense. It’s hard to put this one down.”

“Thurm has created an extremely lovable character in Stacy, and the reader’s anxiety about her situation mounts as we see everything about her husband that she does not…All the minor characters in the novel are spot-on down to the slogans on their T-shirts (a Thurm trademark), but the book’s ultimate success depends on its depiction of Roger.”