A suspenseful tale of resilience that will resonate with anyone who has ever yearned for a fresh start.
Six years after a violent home invasion and the mysterious disappearance of their older cousin, two sisters begin to put together the pieces of what actually happened.
No one ever leaves the backwater town of Beaumont, Missouri. Amelia and Kylee Crow’s older cousin, Grace, comes closest to getting out—she was both at the top of her class and the first in their family to get into college—but all that changed the night she vanished while babysitting them. Years have passed since that fateful, bloody evening, and while most of Beaumont’s residents have moved on with their lives, Amelia can’t shake the feeling that the truth of what happened is still out there waiting to be found—and so is Grace, dead or alive. When the body of a young woman is discovered on a piece of property in town, old questions are dredged up, fingers are pointed, and Amelia and Kylee soon learn that their family might not be the only one with skeletons in the closet. The story is told in alternating sections, starting with chapters narrated by Amelia as she and Kylee search for answers, and then switching to chapters written from Grace’s point of view leading up to the night of her disappearance. Grace’s chapters help readers fill in the pieces that Amelia and Kylee struggle to put together, as well as emphasize the love that exists among all three girls in a world that is extremely unkind and violent toward young women. Where McHugh’s writing truly shines, however, is in her descriptions of the town of Beaumont and its residents. From Amelia and Kylee’s pole-dancer mother—who loves and deeply resents her daughters in equal measure—to the meatpacking plant where everyone works after high school, she deftly captures the hardships of a small and insular community with vivid detail.
A suspenseful tale of resilience that will resonate with anyone who has ever yearned for a fresh start.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593448854
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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