‘Imaginary Strangers’ (2024) excitingly internalizes the mystery-thriller

Minka Kent brings us directly into the mind of a sociopath in “Imaginary Strangers” (2024). But this isn’t a stereotypically violent sociopath; rather, homemaker and mother Camille Prescott compensates for her condition of not feeling traditional empathy toward her husband and two children by instead feeling intense loyalty.

Kent’s 10^th book under her own name (she also writes romances under a pen name) is a bracingly insightful portrait of a condition that’s one of the hardest to glean sympathy. Sometimes the awkwardness is the point, like in the disturbing movie “Thoroughbreds,” about a young woman who kills not out of any negative emotion but out of practical opportunism. A viewer is forced to grapple with the fact that the villain has no control over her bad behavior.

Deeper into sociopathy

But in “Imaginary Strangers,” Kent wants us to understand – and therefore sympathize with — Camille. She lays important groundwork in that Camille doesn’t commit any evil acts against innocent people. And since I notice many commonalities with my own condition of high-functioning autism – primarily Camille’s masking (creating a personality and behaviors to pass as normal) – I desired to learn more about her with every turn of the page.

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Granted, in the opening flashback, Camille thinks about killing her mother Lucinda, someone so totally cruel (she can’t be bothered to feed her daughter, and informs her that a child’s job is to take care of the parent) that a case could be made that it would be justified. But even then, she doesn’t do it.

To hate this first-person narrator would be to judge her for thoughts she can’t control (but wants to; she attends regular counseling) rather than for her actions, and I’m guessing most readers are not that harsh. Plus, there’s the simple fact that we’re always with the narrator, due to the intimate connection.

Camille does use gamesmanship to gain the adult life she desires: She skillfully works to attract surgeon Will with a sexy dress and carefully calibrated courtship, but the resulting bond is not fake. When we move to the present day, her actions come from a place of protecting her children, Georgie and Jackson.

Camille lives in a paranoid world where potentially everyone is out to get them, and we as readers are drawn in. Camille believes her twisted mother is still out there in Chicago (the initial setting) and San Diego (where the Prescotts relocate). She believes Lucinda has hired Imogen – the school proctor Georgie thinks is called “Imaginary” – to worm back into her life and ultimately kill her and her family.

Everybody’s comin’ to get you (Spoilers)

(SPOILERS FOLLOW.)

I thought paranoia would be a core theme of “Imaginary Strangers”; even the title hints at it. It sort of is: Camille’s husband and mother-in-law believe Camille is overreacting to Georgie’s friendship with Imogen. Also, Camille worries that her own “craziness” has been passed down to her daughter, who is unable to make real friends. Perhaps Georgie – who plays the mean “ignoring game” with her brother — also is a sociopath.

I anticipated a twist at the end revealing that this is all in Camille’s head; I expected the book to be a lesson in how the world is not as wicked as one’s worst fears would suggest. Because Camille finds out it’s easy to game the medical system and acquire someone else’s records doesn’t mean someone will do that.

Ultimately, though, all of Camille’s fears are valid. This strikes me as an underwhelming and strange choice by Kent, and I would’ve liked more clues pointing to the narrative twist that’s separate from Camille’s condition. However, these flaws do not undercut the novel’s crowning achievement in character crafting.

(END OF SPOILERS.)

Into the spiral

Setting aside the issue of whether it’s right or healthy for a mother to worry 24/7 about real and imagined threats to her children’s safety (for the record, it’s not healthy), “Imaginary Strangers” is undeniably thrilling. It’s extra thrilling because we sense the unhealthiness of the way Camille’s neurodiverse brain works overtime, all the time. Whether she’s correct or incorrect about the case she’s pursuing against Lucinda, Imogen and other suspicious people, it’s apparent that her own mental health is on the fritz. We – like her loving husband — don’t want that for her.

“Imaginary Strangers” has steady tension because of how Camille’s brain operates, and it’s legitimized by clues that show she’s technically not wrong about anything. By mixing the thriller-and-mystery genre with the internal sociopathic experience so well that you’d think the author has the condition (she doesn’t; she just researched well), Kent achieves a literary alchemy: an obsessively looping page-turner, deeper in the feeling of tension than in legitimate tension. But internal troubles do propel some people; it’s not healthy, but it’s not something to brush off.

I have to give a demerit for a few too many copy-editing errors (Kent likes the grammatically incorrect phrase “a myriad of” and her editors don’t save her). But what should really not be successful is Kent’s goal of having a reader fly through 258 pages about a paranoid sociopath. “Imaginary Strangers” (the first of the “Dangerous Strangers” series) pulls it off, and will send many readers straight toward ordering the sequel, “Circle of Strangers.”