Review: 'The Turnout,' by Megan Abbott

Dara, the heroine of Megan Abbott's new thriller, "The Turnout," has spent her life in her mother's shadow. Together with her sister Marie and husband Charlie — who was once their mother's star pupil — Dara runs the Durant School of Dance, the studio her mother founded.

As refined as Dara's world is, it's also characterized by ruthless ambition and the intense competition the sisters foster between their students. According to the studio's advertising, "Every girl wants to be a ballerina."

After a fire, as they're ramping up for the annual production of "The Nutcracker," the sisters hire a contractor to rebuild. Equal parts rube and fairy tale monster, Derek epitomizes everything Dara thought she'd banished from their lives. To make matters worse, he starts sleeping with Marie. And the job seems to be taking a lot longer than he promised.

As it becomes apparent that Derek has ulterior motives, his presence in the studio strains the relationship between the sisters, and Dara must face truths about her family that she has hidden from herself for years.

Since she started publishing period noir two decades ago, Abbott has used the crime genre to explore fraught relationships between women. Like previous novels "Dare Me" and "You Will Know Me," which were about competitive cheerleading and gymnastics, respectively, "The Turnout" is set in an insular, high-stakes world, and its characters pay a steep price to succeed. Dara and Marie live with chronic pain, and dancing has all but crippled Charlie. When jealous peers put razor blades in a student's shoes, Dara isn't even surprised. Abbott plays the scene for a horrified laugh.

Even if we don't always like Dara, who has internalized the worst of her mother's ideas, we sympathize with her desire to discover the truth and free herself from her mother's legacy. Scandalized by Marie's fling with Derek, Dara thinks of her sister as an animal. Sex turns Dara's world on its ear. Nearly everywhere, with Derek in the studio, Dara sees or hears innuendo.

Because Derek's such a buffoon, it's fun to watch the ease with which he gets the best of Dara. Brash, vulgar, leery, he's a comic villain — until it seems he might not be the villain.

Is Dara complicit in the ruthlessness she fosters in her charges? To the book's credit, that remains ambiguous. Rather than a change of heart, catharsis comes from the promise that we can free ourselves from the burden of the past and our darkest selves by facing both square on.

Like most domestic noir, "The Turnout" is a slow burn. After a long wait, when violence comes, it seems that much more arresting. Were Abbott not so accomplished, we might tire of reading before the stakes become clear. But from the first page to the reveal at the end, a palpable sense of menace and the sympathy we feel for Dara as her world unravels make it impossible to look away.

Thomas Andes is a writer and musician in New Orleans.

The Turnout
By: Megan Abbott.
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 352 pages, $27.