REVIEW: 'His & Hers,' by Alice Feeney, and 'The Residence,' by Andrew Pyper

By Alice Feeney. (Flatiron, 304 pages, $27.99.)

Since Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl," the domestic thriller in which male and female partners take turns seeing who's the more unreliable narrator has become commonplace (see also "Fates and Furies," "The Perfect Wife" and others). Alice Feeney almost seems to be nodding to its omnipresence by paring the subgenre to its essence with the blah title, "His & Hers."

He is a small-town British cop whose usually boring job becomes uncomfortably more interesting when a woman is brutally slain. She's a BBC anchor who's reporting on the case even though she was friends with the dead woman and used to be married to the cop.

Feeney is forced to do a lot of heavy lifting to set up the unlikely scenario but, once things are in motion, her dazzling ability to twist and twist again is fun to read. Even if you don't buy the final switcheroo, you have to hand it to Feeney for daring to give it a go.

CHRIS HEWITT

A deep evil lurks in the White House.

Politics aside, we're not referring to present-day Washington, D.C., but the presidency under Franklin Pierce, from 1853 to 1857. This was a period of great sadness in the presidential residence, history tells us. Author Andrew Pyper takes the known facts a step further with this dramatic horror novel based on true events of the time.

Pierce and his wife, Jane, are having difficulties because, when nominated, Pierce had promised her there was no chance he would be elected president. Voters disagreed in a landslide victory. The reluctant Pierces were off to the White House.

The frail and somber Jane had lost two sons already, one just after birth and the other to typhus. She had only young Bennie to love now.

As the family takes the train to Concord, a sudden derailment sends little Bennie flying. Train cars roll down a hillside. Bennie does not survive.

But the accident is no surprise to Jane, who is haunted by a malevolent voice that has told her: "All the boys will die and the women broken."

In Pierce's victory, the dark spirit has made it inside the White House, where he wreaks terror and havoc on the family and the staff. Far older apparitions, such as the benevolent spirits of slaves who built the White House, watch in fear.

The encounter with the spirits, and the way the Pierces deal with it once and for all, feeds into history's stories of ghosts and evil in the White House. It's a fascinating blend of truth and speculation, and as Halloween approaches (not to mention the presidential election), readers are likely to feel a timely shock to their senses.

GINNY GREENE