We should start with the rules: You can’t read one without the other, and you must read The Plot first. These two novels by Jean Hanff Korliz are closely related stories about a married couple who are both authors of best-selling novels, with one a plagiarizer and the other a homicidal maniac. Jacob Finch Bonner had an undistinguished writing career followed by spectacular success with a book based on a stolen plot from an author who died before his work was published. The fictional characters in “Crib” are the product of Bonner’s acquired plot, while the real characters in The Plot: A Novel (2021) have different names but similar roles. Bonner marries a woman with a complex background, and everything is going well until things start to unravel. His wife, Anna Williams-Bonner, becomes the grieving widow after Bonner is thought to have committed suicide, and she writes a best-selling novel called “The Afterward” that fictionalizes her husband’s death. Korliz captures that story in The Sequel, published in 2024, which begins where The Plot left off. It turns out that Anna Williams-Bonner specializes in remorseless homicide and cleverly invents rationales for killing parents, a sibling, a daughter, a husband, and strangers when necessary. If that is not enough, she also steals identities. Oh, and the night the lights went out in Georgia is when our protagonist buries her backwoods southern lawyer on top of her daughter’s coffin. You need to read both books to learn how that works out.