Hard Girls proves that Lennon is not bound by a particular genre; he goes where the story is. 

His last novel, Subdivision, was a trippy Philip K. Dickian dreamscape. Before that, Broken River was an unconventional psychological thriller told from the perspective of a literal representation of the traditional omniscient narrator. And before that, The Familiar played with alternate realities… or did it?… it’s an open question. Hard Girls, in contrast to those three, is a crime novel. It’s the story of two estranged sisters, Jane and Lila Pool, searching for their enigmatic, estranged mother, Annabel Pool.

Before reading Hard Girls, I would have also said that no Lennon novel is ever the same (noting, I haven’t read his earlier work, and for all I know, they’re part of an epic series… they’re not… but I haven’t read them so I can’t be sure… I mean, I am sure… but, anyway…). Hard Girls breaks that trend. It’s the first book in a series. And while I can’t deny a tinge of disappointment that the next novel won’t be something completely new and different – it’s a sequel to Hard Girls – I can understand why an author (for commercial reasons) would want to stick to one set of characters, especially when they’ve stumbled across two protagonists as fascinating, flawed and dynamic as Jane and Lila Pool (the Hard Girls of the title).

Hard Girls might be more straightforward than Lennon’s last three novels, but that doesn’t mean it’s conventional. The non-linear structure, alternating between the past and present, which in and of itself isn’t new, allows Lennon to cleverly flesh out Jane’s backstory (the novel is told mainly from her perspective). Throughout the book, we learn about Jane and Lila’s teenage years (they’re fraternal twins), brought up by an absent-minded academic father and an aloof, cold mother (who disappears for weeks on end, Jane and Lila assume she’s having multiple affairs and might even have numerous families). We then return to Jane’s present-day situation, where we learn that she’s a mother with a teenager who was pregnant while in jail. She hasn’t seen her twin for a decade, her mother for longer… and then she gets a coded message (using Nesbitt’s The Railway Children – WHICH I JUST READ!!! – as the cipher) from Lila with news that she has found their mother.

I’m missing chunks (their father, Harry Pool, has an arc that goes interesting places), but so I should. This is a novel that holds its secrets tightly. But for all the plot shenanigans, this story is about mother/daughter relationships; on that count, it’s both edgy and compassionate. If you’ve never read Lennon, this would be a terrific entry point, given there’s a sequel to come next year.