Some thrillers hand you a locked room and dare you to find the way out. In Helpless, Jessica Knoll hands you a locked room, lets you get comfortable, then quietly changes the deadbolt while you are still admiring the first one. Her fourth novel is her most brazen yet, a book about desire, control, and the stories we invent to survive our own worst decisions.<\/p>\n
Faye Heron is a Hollywood triple threat, an actress who also writes and directs, one half of a glossy producing marriage, the kind of woman who gets her forearms lasered smooth and buys loafers that cost as much as a loose diamond. When her beloved old film professor dies, she flies back to the small New York college where she spent four scholarship years and one all-consuming romance. Henry Spalding was that romance. Twelve years on, he is a married father running the family business, and he is also, by Faye\u2019s own confession, the appetite she has spent an entire career trying to reproduce on set.<\/p>\n
Then he drugs her and drives her to a remote cabin.<\/p>\n
That is the premise the jacket copy will sell you, and it holds up as far as it goes. What the copy cannot tell you, because it would spoil the pleasure, is how often the ground shifts under Faye\u2019s captivity. This is a book that keeps reversing its own current: who is trapped, who is steering, who is lying to whom, and whether Faye\u2019s \u201chelplessness\u201d is the truth or the costume she chose before she ever left Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
The engine of the story is a years-old mystery that widens every time you think you have reached the floor of it. Knoll doles out information the way a good dealer handles cards, showing you just enough to make you bet, then flipping something that changes the value of everything already on the table. The chapters are short and the tension is close and physical. You feel the cold lake water, the granola bar he leaves for a woman who did not know food could make you fat until she met him, the hand at the throat that is somehow both threat and invitation.<\/p>\n
If you have read Luckiest Girl Alive<\/em>, you already know Knoll writes women who package their pain like a product launch<\/a>. Faye is her sharpest creation yet. She clocks everything: the crotch-creased linen on a grieving child, the class signaling of a cabin that rations its electricity \u201cby design,\u201d the way wealthy people pay to live like they are poor and then call it a vacation. Her wit is cruel and self-implicating in equal measure, and it is the thing that makes a claustrophobic situation feel oddly spacious. You keep turning pages not only to learn what happens next but to hear what Faye will say about it.<\/p>\n That voice also solves a problem that sinks weaker books of this type. A captivity story lives or dies on whether you believe the captive. Faye is a professional storyteller, an unreliable witness by trade, and Knoll aims that fact straight at the reader with a completely straight face.<\/p>\n There is plenty to praise, so let me be specific about it:<\/p>\n The pacing is merciless.<\/strong> Short scenes, rising stakes, and a decades-old secret that refuses to stay small. It reads faster than its page count suggests. The average reader landed this one at four stars, not five, and the missing star deserves an honest accounting.<\/p>\n The very trick that makes the finish so clever also keeps you at arm\u2019s length. Once you sense the game being played, stretches of the middle can feel like pieces being slid into position rather than people making choices. I would be doing you a disservice if I sold Helpless<\/em> by Jessica Knoll as a cozy mystery with a spicy subplot. It is explicit, it plays on purpose with fantasies of submission and force, and it treats those fantasies as something to examine rather than to endorse. If graphic sexual content or dark power games are a hard no for you, this is a clean pass. If you can sit with discomfort and want a thriller that has a genuine argument to make about female desire and public shame, Helpless<\/em> by Jessica Knoll goes somewhere most of the genre will not.<\/p>\n Knoll broke through with Luckiest Girl Alive<\/em> in 2015, later adapted into the Netflix film starring Mila Kunis, which she wrote and produced herself. The Favorite Sister<\/em> arrived in 2018, and Bright Young Women<\/em><\/a> in 2023 pulled the true-crime camera off a notorious killer and turned it toward the exceptional women he targeted. Helpless<\/em> by Jessica Knoll is her fourth novel, and it belongs to the same family of ambitious, self-reinventing women boxed inside other people\u2019s narratives. What is new is the metafictional nerve and the willingness to be this sexually candid. Longtime readers will recognize the bloodline; newcomers will meet her at her least buttoned-up.<\/p>\n For readers chasing the same voltage, a short stack to line up:<\/p>\n Gone Girl<\/em> by Gillian Flynn<\/strong>, the obvious ancestor, for the poisoned marriage and the weaponized narrative. Fans of dark, twisty, sexually frank thrillers who love an unreliable narrator and a finish that makes them want to flip back to page one. Readers of Flynn, Jewell, and Knoll\u2019s own back catalog will feel right at home.<\/p>\n Anyone who wants a tidy, fair-play mystery, a hero to root for cleanly, or a book with no explicit content and no uncomfortable questions about desire.<\/p>\n Helpless<\/em> by Jessica Knoll is not a comfortable read, and it is not trying to be. It is a sly, sexy, mean little book with a con at its center and a real idea humming underneath the con. It stumbles where its own cleverness gets in the way of feeling, and Henry stays frustratingly flat, but Knoll\u2019s voice and sheer nerve carry it across the line. Come for the locked cabin. Stay for the moment you realize who has been holding the key the whole time. On the strength of that last maneuver alone, Helpless<\/em> by Jessica Knoll lands near the top of the season\u2019s thriller pile, and it confirms that Knoll is still one of the very few writers willing to make her readers complicit in the wanting.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some thrillers hand you a locked room and dare you to find the way out. In Helpless, Jessica Knoll hands you a locked room, lets you get comfortable, then quietly changes the deadbolt while you are still admiring the first one. Her fourth novel is her most brazen yet, a book about desire, control, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6740"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What Knoll Gets Right<\/h2>\n
\nThe eroticism is dangerous rather than decorative.<\/strong> Knoll is interested in the uneasy gap between what a woman wants and what she is told she should want, and she refuses to flinch or apologize on Faye\u2019s behalf.
\nThe class comedy is precise and very funny.<\/strong> The old-money world of Adirondack cabins accessible only by boat is rendered by someone who has clearly sat in those rustic rooms and counted the wire hangers.
\nThe ending is a real swing.<\/strong> Without breathing a word about what it is, it reframes the whole book and repays a second read.<\/p>\nWhere the Grip Loosens<\/h2>\n
\nHenry never quite earns his menace. He is meant to be singular, the one man who could unmake Faye, yet on the page he stays more idea than person: a set of gestures, the hand at the throat, the thumbs hooked in his pockets, the stubborn tan, standing in for an interior life.
\nAnyone hoping for a thriller that plays fair with every clue may feel a little shortchanged by how much the book chooses to withhold. The satisfaction here lives in the reversal. If reversals irritate you, this will irritate you often.<\/p>\nA Word on Content, Because Trust Matters<\/h3>\n
Where It Sits in Jessica Knoll\u2019s Bookshelf<\/h2>\n
If Helpless Left You Rattled, Read These Next<\/h2>\n
\nMy Dark Vanessa<\/em> by Kate Elizabeth Russell<\/strong>, for an unsparing study of desire, power, and the stories we tell about our own harm.
\nThe Silent Patient<\/em> by Alex Michaelides<\/strong>, for a twist that rearranges everything you thought you had figured out.
\nVerity<\/em><\/a> by Colleen Hoover<\/strong>, for the same \u201cis the narrator lying to us\u201d itch and the manuscript-within-a-book structure.
\nA Certain Hunger<\/em> by Chelsea G. Summers<\/strong>, for a heroine whose appetites are built to make polite readers squirm.<\/p>\nThe Verdict<\/h2>\n
Who should read it<\/h4>\n
Who should skip it<\/h4>\n