OVER THE FALLS

A Tennessee woman is called on to find the vanished sister who ruined her life.

Bryn Collins has never met 14-year-old Josh Whitman before he turns up at her farm. But he instantly looks familiar to her: He looks just like her former fiance, Sawyer Whitman, whom she sent packing after he slept with her kid sister, Del. That same sister, Josh’s mother, has now gone missing, and Josh has Uber’d across the state from Memphis to beg Bryn to look for her. It won’t be an easy search, since Del has abused alcohol and prescription painkiller for so many years—Josh has mostly parented her rather than the other way around—that it’s impossible to predict her actions. And it’s clear that the downside of failure will be steep once Carl Griffith, a bullying schoolmate of Bryn and Del’s who’s been Del’s supplier, threatens Bryn and Josh with violence if they don’t find Del and the 2,000 pills she vanished with within the week. The search for Del takes Bryn and Josh as far as Colorado, where there are few signs of her but a disconcerting number of signs of Sawyer Whitman, who died in a plane crash 12 years ago. Or did he? Hodge amps up the my-sister, my-frenemy vibe and keeps everything else baby-simple until the authentically messy ending.

A tale for everyone who’s hated her sister and wondered what it would be like to work out all the kinks.