BITING THE MOON

The longtime chronicler of Inspector Richard Jury and his menagerie of friends (The Stargazey, 1998, etc.) goes west for this tale of a young woman on the road from nowhere aiming to solve the mystery of her identity. What would you do if you woke up one morning in a bed-and-breakfast with no memory of how you got there or anything else about yourself, only the smiling promise of the b&b owner that “Daddy” had gone into Santa Fe and would be back in a couple of hours? Well, Andi Oliver, who spontaneously christens herself from the initials on her backpack and the name of the nearby Sandia Crest, isn’t the sort of person who takes things lying down, and long before Daddy returns she has stuffed her backpack with $600 and a Smith & Wesson she finds among his things and has vamoosed. Her first wanderings take her to a mountain cabin that becomes her headquarters as she ventures out to rescue coyotes caught in steel-jawed traps. But months later, on one of her trips to a pharmacy for the codeine she uses to anaesthetize her trapped patients, she hooks up with Mary Dark Hope, 13, who sees Andi as the perfect replacement for her own murdered older sister Angela, and the two decide that, instead of waiting to see if Daddy ever returns to menace Andi again, they’ll hunt him down and confront him themselves. The girls have precious little to go on—just the suspicious behavior of a man who gave Andi a lift and the fact that Daddy’s Camaro had Idaho plates—and they’re constantly getting sidetracked by their weakness for suffering animals. But their adventures among government animal controllers, white-water rafters, hunters of caged wild animals, and dogfight connoisseurs inexorably bring them closer to a showdown with Daddy. Grimes’s young heroines are as grave and enchanting as you’d expect, and she shows a nice eye for the relations between inhumanity toward animals and other, more shocking kinds of same.