An Anonymous Girl: A Novel

Greer Hendricks · Sarah Pekkanen

Jan 2019 · Sold by St. Martin's Press

About this ebook

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller (January 2019) everyone is talking about!

People Magazine's Book of the Week • Bookish's "Must-Read Books of Winter" • PopSugar's "Best Books of Winter" • Cosmopolitan's "2019 Books to Bring to Your Book Club" • Bookbub's "Biggest Books of Winter" • Refinery 29's "Best Books of January 2019" • Crime Reads' "January's Best Psychological Thrillers" • InStyle's "7 Books That You Should Resolve to Read This January" • HelloGiggles' "The 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2019" • USA Today's "5 New Books Not to Miss" • Marie Claire's "The Best Women’s Fiction of 2019 (So Far)" • Hypable's "Winter Releases You Can’t Afford to Miss"

"Hendricks and Pekkanen are at the top of their game...You won't see the final twist coming." —People Magazine

“Beware strange psychologists...the authors know exactly how to play on their characters’ love of danger to bring them to the brink of disaster - and dare them to jump off.” —New York Times Book Review

"Slickly twisty [with] gasp-worthy final twists...major league suspense." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"For those who relished the creepy stalking in Hendricks and Pekkanen's The Wife Between Us, this unnerving tale will have them rethinking what secrets are safe to share and if moral and ethics really matter when protecting the ones you love." —Library Journal (starred review)

"Masterfully escalates the suspense." —Booklist (starred review)

Looking to earn some easy cash, Jessica Farris agrees to be a test subject in a psychological study about ethics and morality. But as the study moves from the exam room to the real world, the line between what is real and what is one of Dr. Shields’s experiments blurs.

Dr. Shields seems to know what Jess is thinking... and what she’s hiding.

Jessica’s behavior will not only be monitored, but manipulated.

Caught in a web of attraction, deceit and jealousy, Jess quickly learns that some obsessions can be deadly.

From the authors of the blockbuster bestseller The Wife Between Us, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, An Anonymous Girl will keep you riveted through the last shocking twist.

Ratings and reviews

An Anonymous Girl a collaborative effort by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, is due for release in early 2019. It is an interesting and nicely-paced thriller with some unfortunate credibility issues. The story is told in alternating points of view, beginning with protagonist Jessica Ferris, a young woman barely getting by as a contract make-up artist in New York City. In first-person narration, Jess describes her turning away from friends and a potential career in the theater after experiencing debasing sexual harassment. She needs more income to support herself, and she also is secretly subsidizing expensive treatments for her sister with special needs. During an appointment with two NYU students, Jess overhears them discussing a highly-lucrative university study that one of them is planning to skip out on the next day. Jess decides to seize this opportunity for some quick cash by showing up for the appointment and impersonating the student. It turns out that the study involves questions of morality and ethics and is being conducted by Dr. Shields-a well-respected psychology professor and therapist. Dr. Shields provides the other voice in the novel, her chapters are presented from the second-person point-of-view. After Jess and Dr. Shields meet in person, what began as a straightforward computerized questionnaire evolves into an expanded, in vivo sequence of experiments with greater personal risk and payment for Jess. Jess increasingly becomes dependent on the money and Dr. Shields but is unaware of the objectives of the research and its underlying motives. The reader comes to understand that Jess is being manipulated, and she is not the first to be drawn into a potentially deadly scheme. Hendricks and Pekkanen require the reader to believe that Dr. Shields has an almost supernatural ability to read people, collect details about them, and persuade them to act. While Jess is a sympathetic character, she makes many dubious decisions and her gullibility is often implausible. The stakes for Jess are so high, the reader might wonder why she allows herself to continue on such an obviously dangerous path. A side romantic plotline is also cursorily brought into the story but it is thin and remains underdeveloped. An Anonymous Girl remains an entertaining novel, with some genuine thrills and originality for those who can suspend disbelief and overlook these minor flaws.

Greed, obsession, guilt, and revenge combine with unreliable narrators and a thoroughly sinister vibe for another unputdownable read from this duo. While the storyline here does go a bit over the top on the believability scale, it still kept me turning pages to see what would happen next between Dr. Shields and Jessica - what else this woman could convince Jessica to do in the name of research as she also compiled a detailed summary of all of Jessica's secrets. But the good doctor isn't the only one out to discover secrets, and all three of the main players in this game have quite the list of things to hide between them. The twists in this one are more subtle than the typical thriller, sneaking up on you even when you think you see it coming. The thing about these characters is, other than those on the periphery, they are not likable, and the more I discovered about them, the less I liked them. In most cases, there needs to be a redeemable character, someone to root for in a story like this one. But it was different with these characters and this story. As they become more and more enmeshed in each other's lives, I couldn't stop reading. I had to see who would come out ahead in the tangled mess they managed to create. Even when I reached the conclusion and thought I knew how it would go, I was still second guessing myself about how I wanted it to play out - and I'm still thinking about that final twist. So, while I normally prefer a faster pace, this one did hold my interest from start to finish. All in all, another page turning domestic suspense from these authors.

Hendricks and Pekkanen deliver readers a dark, suspenseful thriller. The story is so compelling and complex that it almost impossible to put down. Not since Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train has a novel grabbed my attention from page one and kept my anxiety at peak level until the very end. The characters are dynamic and complicated by their perspective and assumptions. This novel is a dark look into the ethics, morality, loyalty, and fidelity within our relationships. I highly recommend this book to fans of the psychological suspense genre. I voluntarily read and reviewed a complementary copy of this novel.

About the author

GREER HENDRICKS spent two decades as an editor at Simon & Schuster. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Allure, and Publishers Weekly.

SARAH PEKKANEN is the internationally and USA Today bestselling author of eight previous novels. A former investigative journalist and feature writer, her work has been published in The Washington Post, USA Today, and many others.

Together, they have written the New York Times bestselling novels The Wife Between Us and An Anonymous Girl.