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Queenpin is Megan Abbott doing a deliberate James M. Cain pastiche, except instead of a husband and a wife and an insurance scam, you get two women across a generation gap, one teaching the other how to walk into a high-end Vegas hotel like she owns it. The young woman narrates. The aging queenpin teaches. The pupil, of course, eventually surpasses the master in ways neither of them quite intended.
Abbott's prose is doing the kind of work that very few people are doing right now. The book is short, the noir tropes are honored, and the female friendship at the center of it is rendered with the genuine erotic charge that the source material usually displaced onto male and female pairings. It is also a meditation on apprenticeship and inheritance that is sharper than its 200-odd pages suggest.
Four stars. A clean little novel that you could read on a flight and think about for weeks. Read Bury Me Deep first if you have not, then come here.
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