*Starred Review* Like a chameleon, noir adapts to its landscape and climate, finding in either sun or rain the climatological ingredients necessary to generate a mood of oppression, foreboding, and inevitability. So it is in Mangan's hypnotic debut, set in 1950s Tangier, where a deadly, Hitchcockian pas de deux plays out under an unrelenting, Camus-like African sun. Alice, a fragile Englishwoman, has landed in Tangier after a sudden marriage to one of those British gentlemen whose pedigree masks his idler essence. The marriage is a way of escaping the scandal that caused Alice's breakdown and forced her to leave college in Vermont. When Lucy, Alice's college roommate, turns up at Alice's door in Tangier, the dance begins, with Mangan switching the narration between Alice and Lucy, as we gradually learn what happened in Vermont and begin to get a feel for the psychological dynamics between the two women. The echoes of Patricia Highsmith reverberate almost too loudly here. Yes, Mr. Ripley has become a femme fatale, but Mangan's take on that familiar theme never seems reductive, nor mere homage. That's partially because of the electrical energy that crackles between Alice and Lucy, but it's also related to Mangan's ability to turn the mood and the setting of the story into a kind of composite force field that sucks the reader in almost instantly. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Scarlett Johansson will play Alice in a George Clooney-produced film that is already generating buzz, months before the book is even published.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2018 Booklist