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I was trying to explain what happens in KISS HER GOODBYE to my husband, and wound up with a piece of paper full of circles and arrows and dotted lines connecting one family group to another and another and another. When I thought I had it all fairly coherently covered, he said: "It sounds like a soap opera, or a Jerry Springer show." And he's right. Matt and Kathleen Carmody have a life as close to perfect as one can get in western New York State. His job keeps him busy, but not busy enough to detract from life with his family. Kathleen gets to be a stay-at-home mom to their three kids. Jen is almost 14, and just starting to exert that annoying adolescent independence. The boys, Curran and Riley, are young enough to be annoying each other but manageably so. Maeve is Kathleen's best friend from high school, and probably best friend right now. Her daughter Erin is Jen's best friend, and a little wilder than Jen, which worries Kathleen but not Maeve. Maeve is divorced, and thinking marriage might not be so bad after all. Erin's boyfriend Robby is from the wrong side of the tracks, and has recently been busted for dealing marijuana. Erin is forbidden to see Robby, which is difficult because they attend the same school. Stella and Kurt have two little girls; Jen babysits for Stella every Wednesday because that's the day Stella mentors the French Club where she teaches. Kurt is cheating on Stella, which everyone in town knows, including Stella, but she's trying very hard to ignore his infidelity because she's not ready to give up everything that being Kurt's wife entails. Lucy tries very hard not to annoy her husband John, because he beats the bejesus out of her when he's annoyed. This stems, at least in part, from an affair she had years ago. Now if you have all that straight . . . Alicia, who looks a lot like Jen, has disappeared. The general consensus is that Alicia, who didn't get along very well with her mother, left town to go to California and live with her father. Not true. Alicia has been murdered. Kathleen senses that something is fishy about the Alicia story, and wonders who the person is she's noticed at odd moments around town -- like at Jen's soccer game, and possible outside the Carmody house, and is this the same person Jen saw lurking outside Stella's windows one night? There are secrets in Kathleen's past which she hopes will stay buried. As you might suspect, that's not going to happen. By the end of KISS HER GOODBYE, five people have been killed. All Kathleen's sins have come back to haunt her and her family. There isn't a whole family unit left, except the Carmody's, and theirs has been sorely tested. It is difficult to ignore the highly improbably nature of the plot details, even as one is reading KISS HER GOODBYE. It is also difficult to put this book down. Ms Staub has mastered the skills necessary for a good suspense novel. While the characters may not be the most complex people I will ever encounter, I still wanted to know what would happen next, and why. I believed, at least while reading, what was happening to the characters. I cared, for the most part, about Jen and her parents and their lives. I did get a little tired of Stella's deliberate myopia, but even that isn't difficult to buy into. I don't like kid-jep, but the jeopardy in KISS HER GOODBYE is tolerable for me because it is motivated, not random or likely to continue outside this particular scenario (assuming the killer isn't caught), and the motivation ultimately makes some kind of sense: a rational emotion taken to an extreme. And there's no sex -- well, the married couples have sex but it isn't described in any detail at all, which is rather unusual but not unpleasant, actually. All in all, a competent novel of suspense.
Reviewed by P. J. Coldren, July 2004
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