The Hand That Feed You

The Hand That Feeds You by A.J. Rich

What’s it about?
Morgan Prager is a 30-year-old graduate student doing research for her thesis on victim psychology.   She comes home from school one morning and finds her fiancée dead.  Her three dogs have apparently mauled him to death.  She comes to find that her fiancée is not the man she thought he was.  Are her dogs the loving pets she thought they were?  She moves from studying victims to being a victim.

What did I think?
I could not put this down!  This is a book that could keep you up reading late into the night. I admit to loving my dog a little too much, but the dog storyline was interesting as well.   The book had it’s downfalls- the characters are not fully drawn and the end of the book seems rushed, but despite these issues I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Should you read it?
This was a great, quick, beach book.  It had an interesting back story- two well known authors collaborated to write this story as a tribute to their late friend, fellow writer Katherine Russell Rich.  Ms. Rich died of breast cancer at the age of 56 but not before discovering that her fiancee was not who he seemed.   This became the basis of the novel.

Quote-
“Bennett couldn’t tolerate the constant chaos of three big dogs in a small apartment, and maybe he was right, the dogsweretaking over my life.  Were these rescues a form of pathological altruism?  This was the basis of my research, a test to identify victims whose selflessness and hyper-empathy were so extreme that they attracted predators.”