Carol LaHines’ “The Vixen Amber Halloway” would no doubt have made for a fuller or richer reading experience for me had I been more familiar with Dante and his “The Divine Comedy,” given that LaHines’ narrator, Ophelia, is a Dante scholar given to references to the celebrated Italian poet. Moreover, I’m sure any number of parallels could be made between the experiences of Dante’s narrator as he descends into his literal hell and the experiences of Ophelia as she descends into a figurative hell of her own making as she stalks her husband after he takes up with the Amber Halloway of the title.
Violating his e-mail (which is how she finds out about the affair), creating an electronic doppelganger to inhabit Amber’s Facebook to find out more about her, sitting outside her husband's and Amber’s new home for hours at a time in her car, installing herself in an abandoned house next to the lovers’ bungalow to better facilitate her observations of the two, ending up killing their dog after it bites her, putting into motion a plan to exact revenge on the two of them – her actions grow increasingly over the top until, like Louise Doughty’s narrator in “Apple Tree Yard,” which Ophelia’s situation put me in mind of, she ends up behind bars, from which, like Doughty’s narrator, she recounts how she came to be in her current circumstances.
Compelling, even unputdownable, her story, just on its literal level, though, as I say, no doubt even more rewarding for a reader more acquainted with Dante than I. Still, even with my lamentable ignorance of the poet, the book made for enough of a satisfying read for me – it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year – that I have no compunction in awarding it five stars.
Mostly it was the narrator’s voice, with its academic but not off-puttingly-so tone, that drew me in. Almost never was I put off by it in the way that I’ve been put off by the prose in other academic novels, even one that overall I liked very much, Jennifer Harris’ “The Devil Came to Bonn,” which also features an academic woman who stalks a man who wronged her and which also is distinguished by prose which for the most part shines but occasionally falters. Barely a few pages in, for instance, at an academic conference, a spokesman is characterized as sighing into the microphone “like a desiccating gust of wind scorching a withered paddock.”
No such moments of academic excess from LaHines, whose special skill for me is to be able to put together complex sentences with successions of subordinate clauses without sounding at all academic. This, for instance, was just one among many such sentences that I highlighted: “Only a woman unconcerned with how she is perceived by the outside world, by former spouse and law enforcement circles alike, would commit her observations of the husband and his lover to eight consecutively numbered spiral-bound notebooks, producing, in three months’ time, a comprehensive, incriminating document that would serve to confirm the prosecution’s theory that she was a spurned wife with rancor in her heart.”
Not that all LaHines' sentences are complex ones; this, for instance, about a female acquaintance of Ophelia’s who doesn’t go home with a guy she met in a bar, is the nicer for its brevity: she had “left with a telephone number, instead of a venereal disease.”
But for all LaHines' felicitous constructions, there is also the occasional lapse, which I don’t fault LaHines for so much as her editors, from whom she deserved better. An instance of “from whence”, for instance, should certainly have been caught, and, more fussily, perhaps, on my part, I couldn't help thinking that “not the least because my mother was by then gone” could have been more naturally expressed as “not the least because my mother was gone by then.”
Fussy things, as I say, barely worth noting, actually, though they do make for momentary blips for a reader, and, perhaps with the novel still in the ARC stage, they might yet be addressed before publication.
More truly troubling, though, for me, so much so that it had me rereading the pertinent passage several times, was the summation by the prosecutor, who concludes with, “I submit to you that Miss Amber Halloway was not an innocent, but a cunning vixen” – seeming to be making the case for the defense. Maybe, though, it was some kind of left-field prosecutorial strategy that I just wasn’t picking up on, or maybe, with the passage being in italics, the reader is supposed to understand that it’s not the prosecutor speaking at all but rather an imagined summation in Ophelia’s mind. Either way, the passage as written made for ambiguity – something else that might be addressed before publication.
Lest I appear too critical, though, with my nits, let me hasten to reassert that LaHines' novel, whether appreciated solely on its literal level or with the fuller appreciation that a familiarity with Dante might afford, is an intellectual treat for the few truly serious readers left among us – the happy few, if you will – with its depiction of a driven-to-extremes woman whom I would imagine any number of women who’ve ever harbored the slightest suspicions about their husbands or significant others could easily identify with.

This book was enjoyable, but strange at the same time. I found it extremely repetitive, and the ending felt a bit lack luster. I wouldn’t classify this as a thriller, but more of a drama so redirect your expectations accordingly.
Ophelia’s marriage falls apart but instead of moving on and starting over, she obsesses and stalks her ex and his new lover.
All in all this was a good read. I wish there was a bit more character development for characters other then Ophelia. It at times felt like a dark comedy, I am a big fan, so this was right up my ally.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

Thank you to NetGalley., the publisher and the author for this eARC.

This cover drew me in, wanting to know the whole story of this Amber.

The narrator speaks in a certain way that works for this kind of book and the unreliable narrator makes you want to keep turning the pages.

Did Ophelia cheat on her husband or did her husband cheat on her? Did I feel sorry for Ophelia? Yes. How dare I. But I did. Can’t wait to read this one when it comes out all over again.

First, I love the cover art and the title, definitely caught my attention, Due to the craziness of this story and the unreliability of the narrator, I was glued to the pages because I was so very curious of the outcome. It was truly an interesting read. I look forward to reading more by this author. I do believe, I am going to need this one for my bookshelf.