Just Finished Reading Tangerine by Catherine Mangan

I just finished reading Catherine Mangan's 2018 psychological thriller novel Tangerine.  Set in the 1950s, it's about the relationship between two young women...Alice Shipley from England and American Lucy Mason...who first meet as roommates at a Vermont women's college, bond closely as inseparable friends, and then abruptly part following a terrible accident there, revealed later in the story.  While the chapters alternate between first person narratives by Alice and Lucy, the time frames also fluctuate between the present time and their college days.  And the present time has Alice, recently married to an Englishman named John, newly arrived with him in Tangier, Morocco.  She is shy and fearful about leaving their apartment but her husband is ebullient about this very beautiful-but-strange locale.  Lucy, desperate to recover their close friendship, seeks out Alice's whereabouts and follows her across the ocean.  What ensues is a psychologically gripping war of will and manipulation between Lucy, Alice, and John...who has incurred Lucy's wrath after she spies him with another woman.  But even more than this, Tangerine is about someone who is a psychopath, who sees hers entire moral world only as it relates to her own self and pride and who is incapable of feeling true love...which is self-sacrificial in nature...and substitutes obsession for it.  And to her credit, Mangan realistically portrays how people are regularly taken in by psychopaths with their apparent emotional honesty concealing their lies, their unwillingness to ever admit defeat, their charm...and their skill at assassinating the character of anyone for whom they bear a grudge: remind any of you of a prominent American political figure during the last five or six years?  I checked out Goodreads after finishing Tangerine to see how other readers reacted to it and their reviews are all over the map, but I noticed that with a few of the negative ones the criticisms seemed misplaced: because Catherine Mangan used the first-person narrative form for her story, that narrative in itself is deliberately inefficient and the characters typically ethnocentric as white, visiting foreigners of the '50s in their view of the Moroccans...don't judge her writing skills or social outlook for that.  Additionally, just about everyone missed the point of what a psychopath is and how one must deal with them completely differently than how they interact with "normal" people who possess a social conscience.  See for yourself and read the book, it's not very long...