THE YOUNGER GIRL

In Jeffries’ thriller, a woman is inspired by her ill father’s cryptic comments to investigate the death of her aunt.

In 1996, accountant Joanna Giordano devotedly tends to her aging, cranky father, Owen, who has Parkinson’s disease and struggles under a “bitter weight of resentment and regret” that he’s unable to explain to others. After Owen’s half brother, Horatio Billingham, dies, he must travel with Joanna from Cathedral, California, to his hometown of Pontiac, Illinois, for the reading of the will. Horatio was estranged from his son, Tazewell, so Owen becomes the sole heir of his property. While in Pontiac,Owen tells Joanna that his beloved, older half sister, Aldine Younger, was murdered at the age of 20 by a man named Asher Bentley, and that Owen’s mother believed that Bentley was hired by his uncle, Frederick Heinemann, who wanted Aldine’s considerable inheritance. Shortly after revealing what appears to be a shocking family secret, Owen has an episode that causes him to fade into a haze of unintelligibility and is hospitalized. This chilling tale was inspired by the true story of the author’s own aunt, also named Aldine Younger and is hauntingly conveyed by author Jeffries. Throughout the narrative, Joanna desperately tries to unravel the mystery of her relative’s death. She hopes to find justice, as well as a means to help her troubled father: “All Joanna knew was that a dead woman took her father captive and she had no idea how to bring him back to her side where he belonged.” Meanwhile, Tazewell tracks her progress and has nefarious designs on Owen’s new property. This is an unusual story that’s sometimes quite tangled and incredibly dark in tone, but it’s told with great poignancy by Jeffries, who writes that she aims to use the “liberating power of fiction” to revive a real-life tale. Her prose is informal in tone but agile, and she artfully crafts an atmosphere of dread. Overall, it’s a grim narrative, but an affecting and engaging one.

An often-gripping story of family dysfunction and murder.