OFF THE DEEP END

All too soon after (mostly) living through an unimaginable trauma, a pair of Minnesota families are plunged into an even darker nightmare.

Juliet “Jules” Hart continues to be agonized by memories of the night she skidded to avoid a deer, sending her car onto, then into, an ice-covered lake. She succeeded in rescuing one of the boys in the back seat—not Gabe, her son, but Isaac Greer, the schoolmate whose mother, Amber, had asked Jules to pick him up. As she struggles to make sense of her life without her son or her husband, Shane, who’s taken up with another woman, the only person Jules seems able to connect with is Isaac, a dedicated introvert who talked with her about more things than you’d expect a 15-year-old to have in common with a 41-year-old until Amber, alarmed by their intimacy, took out a restraining order against Jules. Then Isaac goes missing while he’s walking the family dog. Has he been taken by the Dog Snatcher, who’s already kidnapped and killed two other boys and attempted to snatch a third? Is his disappearance the work of a copycat? Or is it connected, as Falcon Lake Police Det. Hawkins assumes it must be, to his miraculous survival of the car wreck at the hands of a mother who thought she was saving her own son? As usual, Berry tightens the screws smartly in the opening pages and never lets up, and as usual, her ending is more intent on deepening the nightmare than providing a plausible explanation for it.

Warning: The title applies as much to the audience as to the characters.