REEF ROAD

Royce’s murder mystery, involving generational vengeance in the time of Covid-19, would make the ancient Greeks proud.

In 1948, 12-year-old Noelle Huber was brutally murdered in Pittsburgh. The case was never solved; her older brother, Matthew, was a perennial suspect but was never charged. Shift now to Linda Alonso in Palm Beach, Florida. It’s 2020; she and her Argentina-born husband, Miguel, have two young kids and a shaky marriage. Enter “the writer,” whose identity we won’t learn until later. The chapters toggle between “The Wife” (Linda) and “A Writer’s Thoughts.” The writer, we learn—because as the narrator, she tells us so—is a moderately successful mystery writer also living in Palm Beach, a loner and a stalker and more than a little scary. And let us not forget Miguel’s older brother, Diego, who shows up on the Alonsos’ doorstep after many years when he was presumed dead. Royce is a wicked good writer (“Diego had carved out pieces of each of the children’s hearts and inserted himself inside”). Her portrait of Linda Alonso is good, but her portrait of the writer is even more impressively creepy. Shall we call her Nemesis? A very clever gimmick is that the writer is certainly meant to be a stand-in for Royce, the author behind it all. This is meta with a vengeance, a story about telling a story, and fascinating for students of that stuff. Another clever trick is that characters that we have a bias to trust, like Linda, may not be so trustworthy. If this is dirty pool, the reader will have to decide. And there are some serendipitous developments, as the writer is the first to admit. But overall, the gears of this clever plot mesh like those of a Swiss watch. There is some time shifting, but the chronology works out in the end.

A truly absorbing mystery by a writer at the top of her game.