BUTTERFLY PINNED by Leslie Liautaud – Psychological Thriller, Suspense, LGBTQ+ Contemporary Fiction

Fleeing a small and troubled life back home, college student Marin falls headfirst into the attention of the fabulous, wealthy, and mercurial Bette. In Leslie Liautaud’s psychological thriller Butterfly Pinned, Marin gives body and soul to Bette for agonizing want of transformation.

Marin has toiled for the chance to become someone new and continues to fall back into her old limitations. Even as she moves to Chicago with a college scholarship, she struggles to escape the shadows of anxiety and poor self-esteem. But a chance meeting with Bette Winston casts her in glorious and terrible light.

Bette enthralls Marin with poetry, luxury, and the backdoor invitation to a world of refined grandeur. She convinces Marin to double-major in philosophy, while pulling her away from classes and all other mundane responsibilities. Marin gets to share this new world with Bette’s high-class friends Ozzie and Harry, shunning any connection to her old, embarrassing life. But as she meets those who know Bette beneath her lustrous glamor, Marin glimpses a sinister history.

However, even Bette’s shadows pull Marin deeper, until she finds herself living in them.

Terrible family secrets wash away under currents of alcohol and unnamed pills. Bette tantalizes Marin with the trappings of wealth and stirs unfamiliar desire in her chest until all that could possibly matter is the chic, impressive woman Bette promises to carve from her flesh.

Even as Marin sees the yawning chasms between Bette and those who truly know her, she can’t resist clinging tighter to her beloved. With each part of her old self that Bette cuts away, Marin grows ever more confident and ever more desperate. The quiet, unfashionable girl who first moved to Chicago becomes no more than an object of Marin’s disgust and fear. She sacrifices school, family, and her own mind at Bette’s shining altar, until she comes face to face with the dark truths that she’d tried to drown.

Butterfly Pinned binds readers with the same aching tension that Bette binds Marin.

We hear conflicting stories about Bette and see as many of her different faces. She’s a coiled snake, a girl in pitiable need of love, a sophisticate who sees the potential hidden in others, and a living façade who shapes her perfect world from glass and blood. A question—what Bette is truly capable of—grows with each unexpected turn in her behavior. When Marin finally gets an answer, the horror is at once shocking and inevitable.

With an intimate, believable cast of characters, Liautaud shapes an emotionally resonant psychological thriller.

Marin desires what many people do—to change, leave behind the parts of herself that haunt and limit her. Her constant battle to prove herself worthy of Bette’s attention is—while the cause of so much trouble—a motivation that makes her deeply sympathetic. Even when she makes her most questionable decisions, readers will follow her with understanding and mounting fear, rather than judgement.

Bette, conversely, defies true understanding. Her capricious affection and gilded life might enchant Marin, but it’s Bette’s fathomless well of emotional need that makes her impossible to merely turn away from. This combination of mystery and intimate intensity gives Bette’s character a powerful gravity as both lover and villain. She looms over the story and everyone in it, maintaining the curiosity and dread anticipation at the heart of this genre.

Liautaud fleshes out her novel with memorable and revealing side characters. The delightful and deplorable alike mingle at lustrous galleries, Marin refuses the caution and help of those who know the danger closing in on her, and each person’s true nature comes to light as the masks of privileged civility fall away. Slivers of Bette’s capacity for harm show in the guarded words of characters like Harry, Simon, and Eleanor—those few not fully taken by her illusions.

A story of desire and self-deception, Butterfly Pinned asks the cost of truly becoming someone else.

Beauty and cruelty go hand-in-hand throughout the novel as the first disguises and demands the second. Marin frequently refuses to look beneath the glimmering surface of Bette’s world. Even when she knows the murky depths waiting for her, Marin sinks for the chance to emerge reborn in glory.

When Marin’s safety and very capacity to choose are taken from her, she faces grim reality and the risk that she might not emerge from those depths at all.

Equal parts fascinating and painful, Butterfly Pinned delivers both a striking thriller and a profound exploration of toxic love and trauma.