INTO THE SOUND

Her sister’s disappearance forces an alcoholic ex-journalist into a reckoning with their troubled past.

“Please come get me; I need to talk….There’s somebody coming,” Vivian Eddy tells her sister, Holly Boswell, just before the phone call from Bay Shore Marina is cut off. Defying her protective husband, nuclear energy project manager Mark Boswell, Holly leaves their sons, Otto and Tyler, with him and races out in a storm to meet the sister who begged for help. But she’s too late: Viv has vanished, leaving behind a bevy of secrets. As SassyVivi38, she’s been carrying on a sexy online chat with somebody calling himself TomKat45. The struggles of her husband, criminal defense attorney Clayton Eddy, to keep his distance from the mobbed-up relatives of his latest client, Dr. Raymond Gallo, a physician accused of running a prescription mill, have been torpedoed by his affair with Francine Gallo, the defendant’s sister and the cousin of mob boss Nicky Bellini. And Frankie is not Clay’s only lover. Holly seems initially cast as the innocent in all this, but the scars her parents, endlessly manipulative psychology professors Cynthia and Henry Forester, inflicted on both their daughters, whom their mother especially treated as experimental subjects, lead her to a series of singularly bad decisions Reinard traces in merciless detail. As she sinks deeper and deeper into the mystery of Viv’s disappearance, Holly finds herself questioning every lodestar in her life.

Though the heroine’s emergence from this purgatory may be less compelling than her descent, it’s still one wild ride.