Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Crime & mystery fiction

THE WONDER TEST

Michelle Richmond

New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond introduces a tough and spirited new protagonist, FBI Agent Lina Connerly, in this exhilarating race to save Silicon Valley teens from their own parents' ambition and greed.

Lina is on leave from her job in New York at the FBI in order to clean out her father's home in Silicon Valley. As though letting go of her father isn't hard enough, Lina has also recently lost her husband in a freak traffic accident. Still reeling, she and her teenage son Rory must make their way through this strange new town and the high school around which it all seems to revolve. Rory soon starts coming home with reports of the upcoming "Wonder Test," a general aptitude assessment that appears increasingly inane, and Lina is shaken out of her grief by a sense that something is amiss in Hillsborough. When she discovers that a student disappeared last year and was found weeks later walking on a beach, shaved and traumatized, Lina can't help but be sucked into an impromptu investigation. Another kidnapping hits closer to home and reveals a sinister link between the Wonder Test and the rampant wealth of Silicon Valley's elite. A searing view of a culture that puts the wellbeing of children at risk for advancement and prestige, and a captivating story of the lengths a mother will go for her son. Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels and story collections, including The Marriage Pact, Golden State, The Year of Fog, and Hum. She received the Truman Capote Prize for Alabama's Distinguished Writer of the Short Story. Her books have been published in thirty languages. She lives with her husband and son in Northern California.

Available products
Book Published 2021-07-01 by Grove Atlantic

Comments

The Wonder Test is a fast-paced, moving exploration of motherhood and money, danger and deception, privilege and pretense. Michelle Richmond delivers the perfect thinking person's page-turner: smart, suspenseful, layered. I couldn't put it down.

The Wonder Test deftly explores the underbelly of San Francisco, the pressures of Silicon Valley, and the love between a mother and her teenage son. I was captivated by the novel's simultaneously tough and tender protagonist, FBI agent Lina Connerly, and the plot twists kept me riveted until the small hours of the morning. After this, I'll read anything Michelle Richmond writes.

The Wonder Test is fast-paced and smart, thoughtful and full of heart. I never thought a book could combine the thrilling twists of a Sue Grafton novel and the literary complexity of the best Tana French, but Michelle Richmond has done it. The Wonder Test is a triumph and a joy.

International spydom meets cutthroat suburban elitism. After the sudden death of her husband, FBI agent Lina Connerly temporarily moves with her teenage son across the country to Northern California. Her father has also died recently, and she figures she can deal with his house while Rory attends the local public school, giving them both a change of scenery after having lost Fred. The school has all the markers of affluent suburban America: overly involved parents, a ridiculous endowment, and the Wonder Test, an extreme standardized test taken by all the schools in Silicon Valley. Studying such esoteric categories as "Ethicalities" and "Future Functionalities," students don't attend any real classes but instead spend all of their time taking seminars that will prepare them for the test. Lina isn't overly concerned about the school's eccentricities, but when she hears that three students have gone missing in past years only to reappear a week later, underfed and with their heads shaved, her spider sense begins to tingle. Having spent her FBI career in foreign counterintelligence, she can't resist a mystery. Between pinging phones, following suspects, and staging interrogations, Lina eventually approaches the truthand danger. When Rory's girlfriend disappears on the eve of the Wonder Test, Lina and Rory must find her. Appealingly, all of this happens as Lina navigates her own grief, comes to terms with the way she has allowed her job to consume her, and faces the fact that Rory shares her interest in intrigue. The overlay of international spycraft on suburban California, whose shiny facade conceals the most heinous of sins and vanities, is surprisingly effective. Richmond also has fun by including a question from the Wonder Test at the beginning of each chapter, emphasizing the ridiculously competitive world of affluent high schools. The plot is sound, the action exciting, and the characters resoundingly human.