BEST PRACTICES

Dark doings at a rehab facility.

After a self-described “summer from hell” marked by her husband’s infidelity, his subsequent murder, a kidnapping, and a disquieting sojourn at her childhood home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Nora Best is ready for a change. She hopes to find it with a job at Serendipity Ranch, a facility in remote northwestern Montana catering to what Charlie Ennis, its director, calls "troubled" teenage girls. Charlie, an affable older gentleman, somehow manages to convince Nora that the ranch’s draconian behavior management system, which includes public shaming, isolation, and food deprivation, is actually therapeutic. Immediately on arrival, Nora faces a crisis: Irene Bell, one of the ranch’s charges, has been found dead at the bottom of a ravine. Although it isn’t clear whether her fall was an accident or suicide, what is clear is that Ennis expects Nora, a former communications expert, to handle the public face of the tragedy. Florio focuses her energy on Nora’s internal struggles with her situation, giving the reader so little information about Irene that it’s almost impossible to be drawn in to the puzzle of her demise. Even after a second death, Nora’s painfully long effort to separate the good guys from the bad guys forces the mystery to a near standstill.

Hopefully not a harbinger of a new genre: the child abuse cozy.