She Treads Softly: The Understudy

Monday, July 21, 2025

The Understudy

The Understudy by Morgan Richter
8/5/25; 336 pages
Knopf Doubleday

The Understudy by Morgan Richter is a recommended suspense novel set in the competitive New York City opera world.

Kit Margolis, an aspiring trained opera singer, has been hired for the lead in a new opera, Barbarella. (Yes, based on the 1960s cult classic.) Success in this role will place her in competition for other lead roles. Her understudy, Yolanda Archambeau, is an unknown, untrained novice who is beautiful and confident. She also poisoned Kit on the first day of rehearsals. Then Kit finds a rat with a knife stuck in it on her doorstep. Things go downhill and the danger increases from there.

A heaping dose of disbelief must be set aside right from the start. When someone poisons you and it is obvious who did it, you immediately contact the police. When Kit doesn't, the quandary is to suspend disbelief and continue reading or set it aside. Adding to the indecision was the fact that Yolanda is an untrained singer. I decided to continue reading.

The preposterous scenarios continued, but they did become more entertaining in an absurd way and the action increased. Soon enough there is a fatality and Kit becomes an amateur detective. She sets out to discover what is really happening and digs into Yolanda's background. She manages to evade the police. Everyone she meets trusts her and tells her everything they know. She discovers everything about Yolanda's past.

The Understudy by Morgan Richter is for readers who can easily suspend disbelief. Thanks to Knopf Doubleday for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.