Real Bad Things is the second novel by award-winning American author, Kelly J. Ford. Recently jobless, homeless and romantically detached, a string of text messages from her ever-hostile mother is really all the impetus Jane Mooney needs to quit Boston and return to her Arkansas hometown, Maud. “They found him.” “I TOLD YOU THEY WOULD.” “Time to come home.” “Time to pay for what YOU DONE.”

Twenty-five years earlier, inexplicably breaking the solemn vow made with her younger brother, her best friend and her lover, Jane confessed to murdering her abusive stepfather, Warren Ingram, as soon as he was reported missing. Jane was arrested, but without a body, or evidence of a crime, the case couldn’t proceed. Jane left town as soon as she was released.

Now, she’s back to face the music but, new among the lazy, incompetent members of the Maud Police Department, Detective Benjamin Hampton isn’t ready to arrest her just yet. He’s asking awkward questions, and Jane feels the need to check that the other three are sticking to the agreed story. But, for over two decades, Jane has believed a version of what happened that, it turns out, is not quite correct.

Georgia Lee Lane is unhappily married with twin teenaged sons, manages the Maud Pharmacy, and has been a city councillor for fifteen years. But her opponent in the upcoming election has plenty of money to splash around, and she is already polling badly enough without her name being associated with Lezzie Borden, the nickname Jane acquired after her confession. But that’s exactly what the “Let’s Talk About Maud” Facebook group, run by a couple of auto body guys, is doing.

In order to survive, Georgia Lee has cast the events of twenty-five years earlier from her mind, but “Some days it felt like trouble hung around her like a coat she couldn’t cast off, weighing her down, no matter how good or kind or helpful she tried to be. It made her sweat. Restricted every forward motion so much that past deeds and present resentments swelled inside her.”

The story is told through alternating narratives from the perspectives of Jane and Georgia Lee, along with flashbacks to the time of the murder. Ford constructs her plot so skilfully that the astute reader who believes they have figured out exactly what happened to Warren Ingram still has a surprise or two in store, and even those who pick up on a few hints throughout the story are unlikely to predict the final, jaw-dropping, reveal.

Ford deftly conveys the Arkansas Bible-belt small-town mindset where “Who cared about crime when you had two women doing something people thought they ought not do?” Maud is painted as a place that revels in gossip and speculation spouted in print, screen and social media, where a strip of compromising photo-booth shots of two seventeen-year-old girls is deemed more important than competing confessions of murder.

While it is easy to empathise with some of the players, none of her characters is necessarily all that likeable: all have very human flaws, and while many are simply trying to get by as best they can, quite a few are downright despicable. Certain scenes in the later chapters are blackly funny, and Ford has a talent for descriptive prose: “words like justice and I told you so spitting out of her mouth like knives”. A brilliant slow-burn thriller!
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer