Looker

Looker by Laura Sims, 182 pages

A woman lives alone in an apartment in a cozy, family-filled neighborhood. Just down the street lives a famous actress and her family. The actress's seemingly perfect life captivates the woman, whose life is unraveling. As the woman's world devolves, her obsession with the actress grows, with the tension ratcheting up with each turn of the page. In her debut novel, Sims has created a gripping view of an unnamed woman's evolution from someone who deserves our sympathy to someone whose instability rapidly becomes off-putting at best (and often downright scary). It's tight, it's tense, and — perhaps most disturbingly — believably realistic. I can't wait to see what Sims does next.