Maureen Corrigan

The objectively better person Agatha wants to bring to live with her on Mesa Portales is her longtime secret love, a woman named Alice, who's now declining into dementia.

But there are two obstacles to Agatha's caretaking plan.

The first is Alice's adult son, Frank Jr., who plans to move his mother into a care facility in Taos.

At one point, Agatha and Frank argue over this plan, and Frank Jr.

drops some bombshell news.

I'm startled, Agatha tells us, but won't let him take my own breath away from me and puff himself up with it.

It's hard not to root for a character who knows how to sling words around like that.

The other obstacle seems more immovable.

It's Alice's daughter, Lorna, who's buried in the backyard of Alice's house.

Years ago, Lorna was murdered by her abusive husband, and Alice likes to sit every day by her daughter's grave, planted with violets and lilacs.

I'm not giving much away when I point out that Agatha's practical, if grotesque, solution to this dilemma is revealed in the cover art of I Am Agatha.

Metaphorically, that book jacket hits readers over the head with a shovel.

this novel becomes even more deliciously weird as a pattern emerges that is whenever agatha talks with frank junior or other characters about alice's welfare alice is never present she is always taking a walk or a nap or just unavailable

and it becomes impossible to ignore that Agatha is estranged from a lot of people.

She makes brief enigmatic references to a falling out with Georgia O'Keeffe and an academic colleague and a parasitic graduate student who's writing her thesis on Agatha's art.

As a narrator, Agatha turns out to be no more forthcoming to us readers than she's been to any of these characters, former friends she now regards as antagonists.

In its ingeniously duplicitous narrative structure, I Am Agatha is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's magnificent Ripley novels.

Not that Agatha is an amoral con artist like Tom Ripley,

but she will do anything to safeguard Alice, her fading love.

We are all of us hunted animals from the moment we are born, says Agatha, contemplating old age and death.