Cutting Teeth

February 1, 2023

Darby, Mary Beth, and Rhea are worried that motherhood is subsuming them, body and soul, and at last they have a distraction: their four-year-olds' schoolteacher has been murdered. Unfortunately, both mothers and children are seen as suspects by the police, and it appears that the children aren't just sucking their mothers dry--they have become literally bloodthirsty. Both creepy thriller and motherhood manifesto; with a 250,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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May 1, 2023
Bestseller Baker (The Husbands) takes readers on a stomach-dropping emotional roller coaster in this suspenseful and darkly comic tale of motherhood and murder. At first, the parents of RiverRock Church’s private preschool students are overjoyed when young Miss Erin Ollie, with her perpetual smile and PhD in child development, joins the faculty. However, their initial enthusiasm wanes as some of the four-year-olds in her class begin exhibiting a morbid fascination with biting and consuming blood. Before long, Miss Ollie is found dead in the school’s supply room with a pair of scissors protruding from her neck, and police zero in on her students and their protective mothers as the primary suspects. Three of those mothers narrate: there’s Rhea, who sells homeopathic remedies online; Darcy, once a high-powered executive, now an overqualified crisis manager for the county; and Mary Beth, who has dedicated her entire life to parenting her two daughters. Baker’s descriptions of the joys and trials of raising children bolster the mystery at the book’s core. With winning cynicism, she delivers a wicked thriller that doubles as a glimpse at motherhood’s dark underbelly.

May 1, 2023
Baker's plot is complex and gripping, featuring a brutal murder and an eye-opening look at suburban motherhood and the competition among the moms to be "the best," someone who would do anything for her kids. When Miss Ollie, who teaches the four-year-olds at Little Academy, is found stabbed to death in her classroom with a set of tiny footprints in the blood around her body, no one knows what to think. A four-year-old as killer sounds ludicrous, except that most of the kids in the class are victims of Renfield's syndrome, an obsession with drinking blood. The doctors say it's just a phase, but when the kids bite their parents hard enough to draw the blood they crave, or suck on disgusting things, it's hard to ignore. Darby, Mary Beth, and Rhea are all secretly terrified their child is the killer, but the truth turns out to be horrifying, tragic, and shocking. Dark secrets, retribution, and the lengths a mother will go to to protect her child all feature in this twisted, disturbing story that will keep readers off balance from beginning to end.

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Starred review from June 1, 2023
A tony preschool is plunged into chaos when a beloved teacher is murdered during--or because of?--a disturbing outbreak of bloodsucking among her otherwise adorable students. What could be a more perfect and hilariously dark metaphor for privileged modern motherhood than Baker's invention of "pediatric Renfield's syndrome"? In Miss Erin Ollie's class at the usually perfect Little Academy in Texas, many of the 4-year-olds have taken the age-appropriate problem of biting a step further: They bite for blood. Particularly, they crave the blood of their mothers, who decide collectively that this is a need like any other--although, admittedly, grosser and creepier--and that it will pass and, in the meantime, must be met. Attachment parenting at its finest! Any parent who has imagined that their young children are draining the life out of them will both get the joke and feel the (piercing) pain. When Miss Ollie turns up dead in the school supply closet, everyone wonders: Was one of the newly vampiric children involved? Three different moms--Rhea, Mary Beth, and Darby--provide rotating perspectives. Each has secret information about the day of the murder, and all three make misguided decisions designed to protect their kids. In keeping with the ruthless satirical tone, though, what they want to protect their kids from most isn't bodily harm--it's a bad reputation. Red herrings abound and clues are dispensed tantalizingly. The building social tension is so good that the murder mystery can feel almost unnecessary. Will it come back to bite readers in the end? In the meantime, Baker limns the fascinating ways parents in a community can be simultaneously at odds with and bonded to each other and how the pressure of parenthood makes crisis hard to define. Gruesome, funny, jam-packed, sharp as baby teeth.

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