MARGUERITE BY THE LAKE

Carter’s second thriller is a searing contemporary take on Daphne du Maurier’s classic neo-Gothic Rebecca.

What unites Marguerite Gray and Phoenix Sullivan most closely is their shared love of Rosecliff, the Grays’ 20-acre Connecticut estate, which lifestyle influencer Marguerite, who’s been cut off from her old-money family’s wealth, writes about ardently and influentially even though Phoenix, a member of Frank Brizzi’s gardening crew, is the one who tends it most lovingly. The two women’s symbiotic but profoundly unequal relationship is threatened by a series of escalating calamities. The first doesn’t seem like a calamity: Phoenix saves ex-attorney Geoffrey Gray, Marguerite’s husband and partner in the charity Greenhaven Gardens, from being crushed to death by a falling spruce tree. But then Geoffrey makes advances to Phoenix, slowly wears her down and takes her to bed, and fosters her undying love for him. Matters come to a head when a confrontation between Phoenix and Marguerite, who’s grown steadily more suspicious of the gardener, ends with the lady of the manor plunging from a cliff. Geoffrey wastes no time in getting Phoenix to move in, and he’s clearly ready to move on. But his staff isn’t, and Taylor Gray, his razor-sharp law student daughter, also isn’t. Nor, most movingly, is Phoenix herself, who’s tormented by accusatory visions of Marguerite, conflicts real and imagined with everyone she turns to, and the crushing certainty that she’s never going to be seen as a replacement or a legitimate successor to the first wife of her lover, who inevitably turns out to be hiding secrets of his own.

Not to be missed, and definitely not to be imitated.