Horsley’s (Between the Legs, 2015) biography/memoir curiously intertwines the lives of two women, separated by half a century.

On April 9, 2000, Horsley’s only child, 19-year-old Aaron Heath Parker-Davis, was walking home from work in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he was struck and killed by a passing car. It took more than 17 years for the author to bury his ashes in the New Mexico desert. During her years of grieving, she came across pieces of information about a stranger who’d died many decades earlier—Suzette Ryerson Patterson, the daughter of one of Philadelphia’s Main Line high society families. Horsley began seeing unusual similarities between events in her own life and Suzette’s, which led her to contemplate the possibility of cosmic connections. For example, on April 9, 1912—exactly 88 years before Aaron’s death—Suzette and the Ryerson family, vacationing in Paris, received a cable informing them that Suzette’s beloved 19-year-old brother Arthur had died in an automobile accident. The family immediately arranged to return home aboard the first ship available: the RMS Titanic. From a lifeboat, Suzette watched her father go down with the ship on April 14—the same date that Aaron’s memorial service was held, 88 years later. By her own admission, Horsley, a writer and community college teacher, became obsessed with learning everything she could about Suzette’s short but remarkable life, which included years as a volunteer nurse on the front lines during World War I. The author’s dogged research led her to contact the few remaining members of Suzette’s extended family, peruse newspaper articles and letters that the woman wrote to her mother, and gain access to family photos—many of which she reproduces here. The overall result is a poignant and often riveting historical work, interspersed with Horsley’s emotional, first-person account of her painful search for peace in the face of tragedy. In the portions that focus on Suzette’s life, the author also offers vivid accounts of the horror of the Titanic’s sinking, the trauma of the World War I, and, not incidentally, the extravagant lifestyles of the wealthy elite.

An engaging, passionate book that leaves some lingering metaphysical questions unanswered.

A reporter and an exchange student fight their way through a dangerous psychological maze in coastal France.

The camera is still running on the video recording German tourists are making of sunrise over the lavender fields in France when a barefoot and bloodied girl emerges from the woods and is hit by a car. The video goes viral with the plea to help the #AmericanGirl, and Molly Swift cuts short her holiday to try to get past the other hacks camping outside the hospital where the girl, identified as Quinn Perkins, lies in a coma. She’s a student from Boston who’s been living in St. Roch with the Blavette family on a cultural exchange program. Passing herself off as Quinn’s aunt, Molly learns that the girl’s chances of coming out of the coma are 50/50. Molly should be pleased that she’s so well-placed to scoop her competitors and get a story for her podcast, American Confessional, especially since the Blavettes have gone missing and are therefore good copy. But sympathy for the helpless girl leads her to a more auntlike role than she’d planned. She finds an ally—and a lover—in Inspector Bertrand Valentin, head of the St. Roch police. Molly asks for Quinn to be discharged to her care and begins helping the girl piece together her lost memories. A disturbing picture emerges of Quinn’s host family. The father had to sell the family mansion and then disappeared two years ago. The wife was forced to teach school and take exchange students to make ends meet. The daughter starves and cuts herself. Quinn is obsessed with the handsome and charming son even though some of his romantic ideas are a little strange. The mystery of a past student’s death, a plea for help sent to Quinn’s phone, and the twin caves Les Yeux teach both Molly and Quinn a terrifying lesson about how deceiving appearances can be.

Throughout her novel’s shifts in narration and chronology, Horsley plays the reader as cleverly as she does the characters.

Horsley’s dreamy, dark concoction imagines the sojourn of Native-American mystic and healer Black Elk in 19th-century Paris.

The connection between Philippe, a serious-minded physician, and Madou, the wild daughter of a well-to-do family, is strong and simple. Both have rejected the allure of love and sex, but likewise disdain middle-class morality. Madou, the more idealistic of the two, longs for spiritual adventure; Philippe, more prosaically, hopes to further the discoveries of medical science (he’s a doctor). The introduction of the sly, silent Black Elk into Madou’s life jars and upsets Philippe. With time, Black Elk gives him a subtle education in medicine, meaning and his own true nature. Philippe’s vocation finally draws him to Black Elk, who is slowly dying of a peculiar homesickness. In the meantime, Madou becomes prey to that most Parisian affliction, love, which will eventually lead to her incarceration in the Salpêtrière mental asylum. Horsley (The Changeling, 2005, etc.) has created a work of great philosophical playfulness. What’s more, she dresses it in the absinthe-laden glamour of the period and brings to life characters who are no less likable for being hyperbolic. The weakness of the book is in the plotting, which meanders at the whim of the author’s philosophical concerns and relies far too much on dreams and hallucinations.

An often enjoyable read, but one whose main conflict fails to convince, depriving it of force.