STUMBLE & FALL

A psychologist attempts to uncover a sex trafficking ring while wrestling with trauma in Rivers’ thriller sequel.

After discovering a criminal conspiracy in her small town, Alamogordo, New Mexico, in Complicit (2021), Kate Medina is compelled to restart her life after losing her job as a high school psychologist. To that end, she remodels her desert home so that it’s all but impregnable, like an “old-time fortress.” She’s overwhelmed by fearful anxiety that sex traffickers in her town will eventually attempt to silence her; prominent businessman Allen Parks, one of them, pays her a menacing visit, chillingly depicted by the author. Kate establishes her own private practice, and while she’s hesitant to mine her clients for information, she keeps picking up clues that point to the conspiracy’s ringleaders. She begins to suspect that her mother’s death was not, as she once thought, an accident and may be connected to her knowledge of the criminal underbelly of Alamogordo. Meanwhile, Kate’s sister, Tilly, moves back to town and struggles with trauma related to past sexual abuse; she decides to use herself as bait to capture a serial rapist. Rivers paints an artfully disturbing portrait of a dark world of criminality that’s as ubiquitous as it is invisible—one in which respected and powerful people prey upon the town’s vulnerable youth. The prose is straightforwardly plain and largely shorn of poetical embellishment, although it can veer into cliché at times: “How could she even consider bringing children into a world like this?” However, the novel as a whole radiates a feeling of gloom that’s as entrancing as it is horrifying. It’s the second installment in a series, and although it’s a self-sufficient, stand-alone novel—the reader doesn’t need to read its predecessor to enjoy it—the two stories are so deeply intertwined that it’s best to read both.

An often haunting tale of sinister secrets.