Replay

The novel opens through the eyes of an unnamed figure — someone who has spent weeks watching a man who jogs every morning at the same time through Manhattan's River Park, planning the technical details of the attack (where to strike, which artery to damage, how delayed the ambulance will be) with clinical precision. The scene reads almost like a medical textbook — no emotion, just calculation.

Chapter two shifts sharply into a completely different tone — May 2011, introducing the career of Andrew Stilman at the New York Times. Starting in the archives at 23, he rises four years later to assistant writer on the "Daily News" obituary desk — five years lived anonymously, on three olives and six martinis a day.

When the paper's finance department notices obituary revenue is climbing, they reward Andrew — in an odd way: transferring him to the wedding announcements column. He succeeds there too, expanding the section by publishing same-sex commitment announcements before such marriages were even legal, and his salary rises accordingly.

His character is sketched in fine detail — Andrew cuts back on drinking not for his health but so he can afford the vintage Datsun 240Z he's always wanted (on the condition of never driving drunk). The chapter ends with Andrew's chance, both-drunk encounter outside a bar with Valerie Ramsay, who will (implicitly) become his wife.

Placing these two chapters side by side creates the novel's core tension — the reader already suspects the jogger being stalked is Andrew himself, but before confirming it, the author carefully introduces his ordinary, at times comic life, so the coming blow lands harder.

• The opening chapter is deliberately written in cold, clinical language — the lack of emotion heightens the tension
• The two contrasting narrative tones (cold-blooded planning vs. light, ironic biography) create an intentional whiplash