Anna Williams-Bonner, the trickster behind the levers of THE PLOT, is back. She just wants to be left alone to enjoy her status as the bereft widow of a literary sensation. But alas, fate steps in.

Granted a residency at a New England artist colony by her deceased husband’s editor and agent, Anna attends mostly to keep up appearances. She’s been touring to promote Jacob Finch Bonner’s last novel and finds herself throwing out an offhand “Actually, I’m thinking about writing a novel of my own.” But at the retreat (after thoroughly lampooning the idea of retreats, and of writers’ angst in general), she has a realization: “[T]hen again, why shouldn’t she be as fine a writer as her dead husband, who had left literature so prematurely, so long before his many theoretically great works could be written?”

"Set in the world of publishing, this book is especially a treat for writers and wannabe writers.... Intricately plotted and fast-paced, THE SEQUEL will keep you turning the pages."

Anna finishes writing it at her New York apartment, and soon she’s touring for her own novel, The Afterword. It’s a thinly veiled fictional account of a beloved’s suicide, and as such, it brings many bereaved and grieving fans to her readings and signings. She’s signing the pre-orders in Denver when a Post-it note on the purchased book brings her up short: “For Evan Parker, not forgotten.”

And here is the challenge with any sequel. THE PLOT was published in 2021, and even a fan of that book (like myself) might have forgotten some of the specifics. We need enough reminding to keep us engaged, but a full-on rehash would slow things down. As Anna’s peace is disturbed with further hints that someone knows her secrets, Jean Hanff Korelitz provides enough background to remember that our reasonable narrator is actually a sociopathic killer: “Never once had she allowed an injustice against her to stand, and that was a policy that continued to serve her.”

Who is harassing Anna? Is it one of her husband’s former students at the defunct college in Vermont? Is it the lawyer she hired back in Georgia, in another life, when she inherited her family home after her brother’s death? She had thoroughly removed all traces of her brother’s damning unpublished novel from her childhood home, had she not? The plot twists and turns as Anna methodically investigates each possibility, with fatal consequences for the suspects: “It was just too bad that this succession of men had taken it upon themselves to violate her space, when all she had ever asked for was the peace that anyone deserved.”

Set in the world of publishing, this book is especially a treat for writers and wannabe writers. It’s only fitting that a major clue comes from an S.A.S.E., the self-addressed stamped envelope enclosed with submissions to agents and editors back in the day. Chapters are named after other sequels of well-known contemporary novels, and the mechanics of writing, pitching and publishing are part of the plot. Intricately plotted and fast-paced, THE SEQUEL will keep you turning the pages.