The Hand that Feeds You is a 2015 psychological thriller/mystery novel by A.J. Rich, a pseudonym for award-winning authors Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment. It features a graduate student studying victim psychology who comes home to find her boyfriend mauled to death by her dogs, only to later find out that he was not who he said he was.
According to the New York Times, neither author had ever written a mystery nor a thriller, but they collaborated with each other to complete the work their friend, author Katherine Russell Rich, wasn't able to finish before dying of breast cancer in 2012. The story was originally conceived when Rich "grew suspicious" of her long-term boyfriend and fiancee "when. . .he said that he couldn’t spend the holidays with her, so she paid a hacker to get into his email" and discovered that "he was living with another woman and seeing several others on the side."
The Hand that Feeds You contains hints of Katherine Russell Rich's life in New York City: Morgan attends John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, and the psychological aspects of the novel--including its theme of sociopathy/psychopathy--might reflect certain aspects of her struggle with breast cancer: her obituary in the New York Times describes her best-known work, a memoir titled The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer, and Back, in which Rich "encounters insensitive doctors (one dropped her, calling her difficult), obtuse psychotherapists (one told her that her health problems were rooted in childhood), unsupportive support groups (one was run by someone with a mail-order divinity degree) and even less supportive bosses (one, apparently discomforted by Ms. Rich’s cancer, fired her)."
The Hand that Feeds You also integrates aspects of Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment's own experiences: the two worked on the novel together at Ciment's apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, which enhanced the New York City backdrop of the story. Morgan's psychopathic boyfriend is at first thought to be a French-Canadian from Quebec, which recalls how Jill Ciment herself was born in Montreal. In addition, an interview about the novel revealed that Amy Hempel "has long been fascinated by forensic psychology and studied criminology at John Jay about 12 years ago."
