Set in mid-1980s Longview, Texas, this is small-town suburban noir with a Southern accent. Nellie Anderson is the beautiful, entitled daughter of the town’s wealthiest family, counting down the days until she can escape it, even as her own ugly streak keeps her on the outside of the social circle she was born to rule. Everything shifts when the Swift family moves to town: a handsome furniture-maker father, an earthy wife who sells homemade love potions, and daughters who, against all odds, get folded into the popular crowd that has always frozen Nellie out. The novel opens with a body in the water and then rewinds to show how a town’s petty cruelties and buried resentments built toward it. No further spoilers here, but the destination is clear from page one; it’s the getting there that’s the point.
Cobb is interested in the way status gets inherited and defended, and in how a mother’s own old humiliations can curdle into something dangerous when she sees them threatening to repeat in her daughter’s generation. There’s a sharp, if familiar, vein here about the performance of small-town wholesomeness masking real rot underneath, and about how quickly a community will sacrifice a scapegoat to protect its own comfortable story. The moral-gray approach to its two central teenage girls is the book’s best idea: sympathy shifts back and forth across the book rather than settling on a clean hero and villain, which is more interesting than most suburban-thriller setups attempt.
One of the things I really liked about “Mercury” was the setting. I feel like the 1980s Texas small town is rendered with real specificity, down to the social hierarchies and the small cruelties that keep them in place. I also found Charleigh, Nellie’s mother, to be a genuinely compelling creation, a woman whose ruthlessness makes sense once you understand what she clawed her way up from. I also enjoyed the change in pace in the back half of the novel; it tightens considerably once consequences start landing, and the last stretch of chapters reads much faster than the first.
I struggled a bit with some of the other characters. Nellie, for instance, is written as so relentlessly awful that she stops being fun to read as a villain and starts feeling like a flat plot device. The book gestures toward giving her some nuance late in the game but never actually commits to it. And beyond Charleigh, most of the supporting cast is fairly thin. Likability isn’t the issue so much as a lack of interiority; too many characters exist only to be either obstacle or victim.
There’s a sturdy, well-observed small-town thriller in here, and Charleigh alone is worth the price of admission. But the pacing drags in the front half, the antagonist is too one-note to be truly menacing, and an ending built around a cliffhanger rather than a resolution left me more annoyed than intrigued. It’s a decent way to pass an afternoon, but not one I’d go out of my way to recommend.