One night in Cape Cod when she was 14, Rennie’s mother Malabar woke her up to tell her she had just kissed her husband Charlie’s best friend, Ben. From that moment on, Rennie lied for her mother, collaborated in her scheming, and cared for stepfather Charles, who had suffered multiple strokes, while Malabar had her rendezvous. “There was so much tightly coiled inside my mother’s affair – love, sin, lust – that the situation seemed destined to explode sooner or later,” she writes in her vivid memoir. Rennie served as Malabar’s “protector and sentinel” for nearly 10 years. She tells her story as an adult, describing a brief marriage to her stepbrother, and a bout of depression. She writes beautifully, even tenderly, as a mother herself, aware of repercussions, knowing how it all ended. (Credit: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)