True-crime blogger Cassie convinces a woman whose lies led to the death of a man she loved to share her story for publication. Growing up in Enid, Oklahoma, Cassie's childhood is colored by an act of violence and her resulting fear of her alcoholic father. She carries such a sense of shame about her past that she has never revealed the truth to her fiance. He doesn't even know that she has a younger brother, raised by her father after her mother died 12 years ago. He also doesn't fully approve of her part-time job writing a true-crime blog that "round[s] up the most interesting murders on the internet," the more salacious the better, most of which feature women as victims. But Cassie is obsessed with the opportunities her blog may open up for her in journalism. So when she reads about Lore Rivera, a woman who "married" two different men in the 1980s and whose legal husband is still in jail for killing the other man, Cassie knows that getting Lore to open up might lead her to publishing gold. As Lore shares her story over the course of many months of interviews, the two women grow closer, though the truth becomes more and more opaque. What really happened on the day of the murder? Who pulled the trigger? Gutierrez offers a satisfying, convoluted path to answering both of these questions, but even more, she provides us with two fully rounded, vulnerable, and fascinating characters in Cassie and Lore. By telling Lore's story through flashbacks beautifully situated in Mexico and Texas, she provides us, and Cassie, with a deep understanding of just how one woman can get trapped into living a double life full of lies. Love, she argues, is messy, fleeting, and out of our control--but it's all the more beautiful for that. Gutierrez imagines true crime's often one-dimensional female characters with sophistication and grace. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Cassie Bowman, who has a part-time job writing true-crime posts for a blog, says that every crime story begins with the writer's obsession. Her obsession is double lives, and her dream is to publish her own true-crime book. She thinks she's struck gold when she reads of a woman, Lore Rivera, who had been a bigamist three decades earlier, leading a double life--one with Andres, a husband in Mexico, the other with another husband, Fabian, in Texas. Discovering the truth, Fabian kills Andres and is sent to prison for 35 years. Sure that this story has the makings of a book, Cassie tracks down Lore in Laredo, Texas, and convinces her to talk about her life. Soon the burgeoning book compromises Cassie's relationships with both Duke (her fiancée) and Andrew, her younger brother. Can anything good come of this? In her first book, Gutierrez has written a compelling, character-driven crime story that holds the reader's interest to its very end, which, yes, is slightly ambiguous, but then, as Lore believes, truth is a malleable thing.

In Gutierrez's engrossing debut, Cassie Bowman, a true crime aficionado living in Austin, comes across a decades-old story about an international banker, Dolores "Lore" Rivera, who was married to two husbands, Fabian Rivera and Andres Russo, the former in Texas and the latter in Mexico. In 1985, Andres was found dead and Fabian was arrested for the murder. Cassie becomes obsessed with the case and shows up on Lore's doorstep unannounced, wanting to turn her story into a book. After some hesitation, Lore agrees and, in extensive flashbacks, her story emerges. In the present, Cassie's investigation agitates members of both of Lore's families, who want the past to stay buried. Cassie, as well, has her own secrets to hide and relives her tragic past as she comes closer to uncovering the truth behind the murder. Gutierrez successfully taps into the current fascination with true crime and considers its potential pitfalls, as Cassie becomes willing to risk everything to get at the truth. While the crime itself isn't so fascinating in the end, the author has a sure hand in creating atmosphere, such as a passage involving the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, when the love between Lore and Andres comes to fruition. There's no shortage of books that travel similar terrain, and while this doesn't stand out from the pack, it'll do the trick for fans of the genre. (June)

DEBUT Cassie Bowman's long-held dream (to publish a true-crime book) is suddenly within her grasp. All she has to do is coax the narrative out of Lore Rivera, who was married to two men at the same time until her first husband murdered her second husband more than 30 years ago. As Cassie and Lore begin meeting and talking, Cassie starts to realize that the book she thinks she's writing may not have the ending she expects. Gutierrez handles her debut novel's multiple timelines, Texas and Mexico settings, and alternating viewpoints with aplomb, and crafts an enthralling story that not only explores the human fascination with true crime but also deftly plumbs the depths of marriage and motherhood. VERDICT Mystery fans beguiled by Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and women's fiction readers who adored Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo will equally fall under the spell of this totally transporting tale.--John Charles