Author Linda Huber usually has two questions that define her psychological thrillers: what makes a family, and how far can you push those bonds before they break. In her newest release, The Un-Family, she turns those questions inside out. This is a family whose bonds were weakened and cracking long ago, and we’re just witnessing their final shattering.

Holly is a young veterinarian who loves her job as a wildlife vet, her husband, and their plans to start a family. But she realizes that something isn’t right, as her husband Dylan becomes more emotionally distant by the day.

Meanwhile, Dylan’s teenage niece Megan, an orphan living with his mother Elaine, is also frightened by the changes only she seems to observe in her grandmother.

Please, Grandma, be okay. Because it wasn’t just this morning, was it? Grandma’d been – different – a couple of times lately. She’d put her specs in the fridge last week.

The Un-Family is a slow-building character study of a train wreck. Holly and Megan are helpless observers as Dylan, his twin brother Seth, and their mother Elaine slowly head toward catastrophe. Unlike most thrillers, the pace is steady, building a sense of inevitable disaster.

I was particularly impressed by the novel’s structure within structure. The book is divided into sections titled with the words of the marriage vows. “For Better, For Worse” is followed by “In Sickness and In Health” and the inescapable “Till Death Do Us Part”. Within each of those sections, there is a second timeline following twins Dylan and Seth from their birth to nonplussed older mother Elaine, and through first their father’s accidental death, and then their older sister’s drug and alcohol-induced demise that orphaned Megan. From the beginning, the boys were in instinctual competition for their mother’s attention while their older sister was neglected. Their pathological need to win was a game played with ever-increasing stakes against an overwhelmed mother unwilling to see, mitigate, or even prepare for any consequences.

The Un-Family isn’t a comfortable read. Most of it takes place inside characters’ heads, dark places where their needs and self-deceptions explain the spiralling disaster nobody will be able to avoid, all told from the most unreliable of narrative points of view.

As a kind of guide, I began to notice the use of the word “different” as a barometer of change. Seth notes that after his father’s death, things will be different. Holly describes the changes in her husband as “different”. And especially it’s perceptive, resilient Megan who sees her uncle Dylan “…with the same face as Seth but everything in behind it different.” And it’s Megan who labels the “different” moments when her life changes, and especially when she worries about losing her grandmother.