A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Carlone Blackwood's quite brilliant The Times debut. A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation. J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she'd like is someone to blame. Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who invites a kind of cruelty. This is an invitation J fully intends to take up and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery and mockery of the darkest depths of human feeling.