I Want You Gone by Miranda Rijks

On its Amazon page, the logline for Miranda Rijks's suspense novel says, "The one obituary you never want to read is your own." Sure enough, the novel begins with Laura Swallow reading her own obituary in a local newspaper. 

Thus the story begins with the hero's problem. And the problem gets worse. As Rijks says in her description of the book, "multiple announcements of her death are followed by increasingly sinister real-life events." 

Story guru Matt Bird says your story is not about your hero's life; it's about your hero's problem. But when the story begins by introducing the problem, the hero's life becomes much more interesting. Her relationships, her tragedies, her triumphs---everything about her will affect the way she solves her problem.

So Rijks had me hooked from the beginning. And I stayed hooked because the book is written in clear, simple prose. I never had to mentally diagram a sentence. I was never tempted to pause and admire her "use of language." She told the story.

And, it is an interesting problem. I really wanted to find out who wrote that fake obituary and staged those "increasingly sinister real-life events," and why.