A Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, People, New England Review, and Crime Reads Best of the Summer "An evocative, suspenseful heir to Patricia Highsmith's best work." --Teddy Wayne, author of The Winner A stylish, unsettling work of psychological suspense about an American woman adrift in Mexico for a year, whose chance encounter with a glamorous older expat spirals into obsession and betrayal. When Sally meets Louise outside her children's school in San Miguel de Allende, she's eager to befriend another American expat--especially one as cultured and knowing as Louise, with her ramshackle house full of art and her stories about her brushes with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. In Mexico for just a year with her architect husband, Sally is entranced by elegant, sharp-edged Louise, and the two quickly become inseparable. Soon enough, Louise has begun calling her Mia and, at first playfully, then in earnest, introducing Sally as her daughter to a growing circle of friends. By turns enthralled with the possibility of a new identity in Mexico and troubled by Louise's magnetic hold over her, Sally attempts to keep the relationship a secret from her husband. As the specter of Sally's troubled childhood looms, and Louise's self-mythologizing tightens its grip, the two women test the limits of reinvention--until their fictions threaten the security of Sally's flesh-and-blood family. A taut, beguiling work of psychological suspense, Mia is a mother-daughter story turned on its head and a high-intensity fable about the limitations of playing a role that is not your own.