Category Archives: fiction

The Last Road Home, by Danny Johnson****

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thelastroadhomeThe Last Road Home, bold and impressive new fiction by Pushcart Prize nominee Danny Johnson, came to me free thanks to Net Galley and Kensington Books in exchange for an honest review. It tells the story of Raeford “Junebug” Hurley and his friendship with neighboring twins, Fancy and Lightning Stroud. Junebug is Caucasian; the twins are African-American, politely referred to during that time as ‘colored’ or ‘Negro’. The story is set during the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960’s, but in rural North Carolina, the Klan stands tall and strong and absolutely nothing has changed in terms of race relations. Junebug finds himself riding on the fence rail from hell. This fascinating tale will be available to the public in late July. Those that love good historical fiction should read it.

The book begins with one horrible loss after another. At age 8, Junebug’s parents are both killed in a car wreck, and he goes to live with his grandparents.  His life is pleasant and stable, helping his grandpa run the farm, but then his grandpa dies too. And by the time his grandmother dies, I have decided that the theme of this story must be grief and loss, or given the number of religious references, perhaps there is some sort of Christian redemption theme here. And on both counts, I find I am mistaken. Johnson is a masterful storyteller, and there is nothing simplistic in how this novel unfurls.

For while Junebug has plenty of questions about the religious fervor that pervades small towns of the South during this era, by the time he buries his grandma, he has had it with religion. “The preacher said a prayer, asking the Lord to be with me in this time of grief. I’d had all of God’s shit I could take and didn’t need His sympathy. If he said it was ‘God’s Will’, I might choke him.”

I wanted to stand up and cheer.

At age 15, orphaned and the sole remaining member of his family, he is on his own. “Fifteen was considered adult in farm years.” Lightning leaves home suddenly, unhappy with the limitations placed on Black men in his part of the world. Fancy is left behind, and she is the only friend Junebug has within walking distance of home. As friendship turns to passion, both find themselves occupying a dangerous place in their community. Given that they are cold shouldered simply for appearing in town together to run an errand, the thought of letting their feelings for one another be known is terrifying.  He recalls his grandma’s admonition:

“’Junebug, you need to understand that cruelty and memory have been married together a long time in the South.’”

Johnson does an outstanding job of depicting white neighbors’ responses to the notion that our protagonist is linked romantically with Fancy. At first they are able to maintain the age-old fiction that she is his housekeeper, but she goes home at night, then sneaks back in darkest night to lay beside him. The muted references, little hints given by Caucasian elders nearby to guide the young white farmer away from a liaison that doesn’t fit local expectations, are rendered skillfully. There are a number of really vicious racial epithets tossed casually around by the local landowners, not always even in anger, sometimes in ugly jokes, as this writer knows from childhood experience is the way racists behave when a white supremacist perspective is not something being fought for as an outlier, but rather the dominant, even comfortable, norm. As the book continues, not only anti-Black pejoratives, but also nasty terms regarding Jews and Asians are tossed into the vernacular. None are gratuitous; they are an undeniable part of the setting, which would be revisionist without them.

Fancy and Junebug seem doomed. He tells her, “It feels like my life’s sprung a lot of leaks, and I’m running out of fingers.” She points out that she only has ten fingers too.

I was watching for the pat ending, the comfortable happy fiction that novelists are often drawn toward. Every time I thought I knew where the story was headed, it went somewhere else. Johnson is brilliant at breaking apart stereotypes, making setting real and immediate, and his character development is strong apart from some minor inconsistencies toward the end. And his framework is materialist by and large, showing that our surroundings and role in life shape us in ways we sometimes don’t expect.

Those interested in this period of history or that love excellent fiction should order this book. It will be available to the public July 26, 2016; strongly recommended.

All the Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda*****

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allthemissinggirlsI was invited to read by Net Galley and Simon and Schuster in exchange for an honest review, and I am so glad I did. It’s a juicy read that kept me transfixed through most of my Memorial Day weekend. You can order your copy now and have it when it comes out June 28.

The format is unique and very effective. We start in the present and step back to the day before, and before that, and so on, because just as is usually true when a person is missing, the most important information is what took place right at the beginning; that’s the part that has the key, and so we receive it last. It creates an electric sense of suspense I haven’t seen elsewhere in a long, long time.

We start with Nicolette Farrell driving away from her job, fiancé, and life in Philadelphia back to her hometown of Cooley Ridge, North Carolina. She couldn’t wait to get away from there when high school was over, and she isn’t eager to go back. And here, I felt her pain, urban snob that I am. Why would anyone want to return to a podunk place like that once they’d tasted life in a cosmopolitan city? But she has little choice; her father is in assisted living, his faculties fading, and Nic’s brother Daniel says they will have to sell the house in order to continue paying for Dad’s care. But Dad won’t agree to sell, and it’s up to Nic to reel him in.

But Nicolette, it turns out, had plenty of very personal reasons for needing to leave Cooley Ridge. Dark, mysterious questions about the disappearance of her best friend, Corinne, have never been answered, and once she is back, another girl disappears, this one the girlfriend of Nic’s old high school flame.  It doesn’t look good.

But Nic knows more than she’s telling; lots of people do.

“We were a town full of fear, searching for answers. But we were also a town full of liars.”

It’s been ten years since Corinne vanished, and now it’s happened again. Daniel is worried about Nic staying alone in that house, because the woods where the girls have last been seen is right behind it, and she’s there alone. He urges her to stay with him and his wife, but she doesn’t like to intrude; her relationship with Daniel hasn’t been strong since that last terrible night following graduation, and so she stays put.

This riveting psychological thriller grabbed me by the front of my shirt and didn’t let go till it was over.  Tantalizing bit by bit, Miranda takes us back to Nicolette’s earlier days, and one clue after another unspools until we sit stunned and amazed at the end. Miranda is a writer of formidable talent, and frankly, I can’t wait to see what else she has in store for us.

You can order your copy now so you can have it as soon as possible; go online, by car, by train, bus, foot, or skateboard, but reserve this book. It comes out Tuesday, and you won’t want to miss it!

Radio Girls, by Sarah-Jane Stratford*****

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radiogirlsFearless women change history.

Radio Girls is a fictionalized account of the British Broadcasting Corporation and the remarkable women that shaped it. As we near the centennial of women’s right to vote in the USA and the UK, Stratford’s riveting historical fiction could not be better timed. I received my copy free and in advance thanks to Net Galley and Berkley Press in exchange for this honest review. I am overjoyed to be able to recommend this new release unequivocally. You have to read it.

Maisie Musgrave is born in Canada and raised in New York City. Tossed out of the nest without a parachute by unloving family, she makes her way to Britain, the place her heritage began. She wanders into the BBC half-starved and looking for an honest way to pay for her room and board, hoping in the meanwhile to meet a man she can marry for financial security.

At the BBC she meets supervisor Hilda Matheson, who fears nothing:  “Give that woman an inch and she takes the entire British Isles,” a colleague remarks.

Under the firm and commanding wing of Matheson, Maisie’s confidence and talent grow daily. It’s a very good thing, because over the course of time, more will be demanded of her than secretarial skills and errand-running.  My busy fingers marked one clever, articulate passage after another to share with you, but to enjoy Stratford’s fresh, humorous word-smithery, you really need the book itself.

Occasional historical figures drop in—Lady Astor, who was a moving force in the development of the BBC and a champion of women; Virginia Woolf, early feminist writer and crusader. Yet Stratford metes out these references in small enough batches that it’s clear she isn’t relying on them to hold her story together; rather, they are the cherry on the sundae.

Setting of time and place, pacing, and a million twists and turns in plot make this a good read, but it’s the character development that makes it a great one. I found myself wanting to talk to Maisie and cheering her on when she broke through to higher ground personally and professionally. I feared for her when she veered into dangerous waters and nearly wept with relief each time she was able to extricate herself and move forward. There isn’t a slow moment or an inconsistent one, and the protagonist is just the character women need to see right now as we move forward too.

How much of this is based on truth and how much made up for the sake of a great story? Read the author’s notes; she spills it all.

All told, Sarah-Jane Stratford’s historical feminist tale is perfect for today’s modern feminists—and those that love us.

This book is available to the public Tuesday, June 14. Change the screen and order a copy for yourself now. You won’t want to miss it!

 

The Last Good Girl, by Allison Leotta**

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thelastgoodgirl This title appeared to be a sure fire winner, a thriller that would also spotlight domestic violence and even more so, campus rape. I was pleased when Net Galley and Touchstone Publishers green-lighted my request for a DRC, which I received free of charge in exchange for this review. And without the social issues, which are a mixed bag but still partially useful, this would be a 1.5 star review, because as a mystery, as a thriller, as any kind of fiction, it doesn’t stand up.

A few months back I unfavorably reviewed a title that I said appeared to be a story that was invented purely to make use of some research; the author appeared to have done a lot of digging and was determined to stretch her story to include the information she’d dug up. But this one is even worse, because it really appears to be stretched around a large number of name brands. In fact, I can save you some time and money just by giving you the majority of the story now, though of course I can’t tell you how it ends, because that would be a spoiler. So, here are the key points, bulleted for easy digestion:

  • Pottery Barn
  • Urban Outfitters
  • Nordstrom
  • Calvin Klein
  • Domino’s Pizza
  • Wall Street Journal
  • Louis Vuitton
  • Tory Burch Shoes
  • Ford
  • Sephora
  • Zagat
  • Bank of America
  • iphone
  • Jim Beam
  • US News and World Report
  • Dodge Viper
  • Netflix
  • Jell-O
  • Krispy Kremes

Even without the endless product placement, many of the above-mentioned names being plugged numerous times, it’s a hard story to appreciate. In place of using plot and character development to tell a story, we are given two premises that are hard to embrace. The first is that our victim, Emily Shapiro, put all her deepest, most heartfelt feelings and experiences into a vlog that serves as a class assignment. All of it. Of course she did! And so the author has relieved herself of the main burden here and instead is dumping all of her Emily information into a single lengthy narrative that alternates with the third person story she has shaped around her merchandise promotions.

The initial premise is that a federal prosecutor, the one and only in fact, is somehow able to assist her old flame with a local case. “We could investigate it as a federal hate crime”, Anna tells Jack.

Sure we could.

The social message that there is too much campus rape that college administrators try to sweep aside to protect the reputation of their university’s brand, is somewhat undermined by other messages that struck me as reactionary. Anna sees condoms for sale in vending machines and “…she wasn’t sure about the wisdom of packaging sex as an option as casual as a snack.”

Maybe we should just go back to the age of the chastity belt. That will take care of that darn AIDS virus and the other STDs, too!

Finally, though it’s a relatively small part of the story, an unwanted pregnancy is treated as an automatic gonna-have-a-baby. I could (and have) seen stories in which the pregnant woman decides she doesn’t like the idea of abortion, and that’s fine. Roe v. Wade and the right to choose it confers isn’t about every pregnant woman terminating a pregnancy; it’s about a choice. What grates on my nerves is the suggestion that no such choice even exists.

If you can find a credible story here to hang your hat on, more power to you. The vocabulary is certainly accessible, if a trifle trite in a number of places. But for me, the joy of getting to read the story free has been displaced by the realization that I’ve been snookered into reading a host of obnoxious advertising because I have agreed to produce a review.

It’s for sale now. If you want it, you can have it.

 

The Fat Artist and Other Stories, by Benjamin Hale*****

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Happy release day! Today this title and another winner, Everyone Brave is Forgiven,  hit the shelves. I don’t reblog all titles upon release; only the ones I really like. Don’t let the cover scare you away, because once I had gotten into the title story, I understood why this was exactly the right cover art. Happy reading!

seattlebookmama's avatarSeattle Book Mama

thefatartistI like short stories. My Goodreads library tells me I have munched my way through 89 collections and anthologies; yet I can tell you that there is nothing even remotely similar to what Hale offers here. Thanks go to Simon and Schuster and Net Galley for permitting me to view the DRC for the purpose of an honest review. You should get a copy May 17, 2016 when it is released, so that when it is immediately banned by various school boards you will know what they’re screaming about.

The ribbon that binds these brilliant, bizarre tales is that each of them features a social outlier as a protagonist. We start with the airline flight from hell in “Don’t Worry Baby”; you have doubtless flown at least once on a flight with a small child whose mother you long to smack upside the head for her dreadful parenting skills, but…

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Britt-Marie Was Here, by Fredrik Backman*****

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BrittmariewashereOh hey, today is Seattle Book Mama’s second birthday! Break open a bottle of sparkling water and toast my humble blog. I’ve done a lot of reading, and so much more is to come.

Britt-Marie is starting a new life after 40 years of marriage, and while she is driving with no destination in particular other than not-home, her car breaks down in a little burg called—wait for it—Borg. While  it’s being repaired, she becomes enmeshed in the life of this small, down-at-the-heels, economically depressed town. It sounds like a lot of stories, but oh, it isn’t. And I was really lucky to score this, a new one favorite, free of charge from Net Galley and Atria Books, in exchange for a fair review.

The beginning didn’t grab me. I incorrectly suspected that there was only one central point to the narrative and we were being hit over the head with it far more than was necessary. But I was fooled, because Backman is a sneaky-smart writer with a wicked sense of humor and a surprisingly philosophical bent. I was amazed at the depths this seemingly simple tale plumbed.

I don’t want to give you too much, and I could easily do it, having once again been carried away with my notes, which number over 300 in my kindle. I kept finding moments that were hilarious, or fascinating, or that just made me think. But here are some broad contours to start: Britt-Marie has lived at home all her life, first with her mother and later with husband Kent, who moved into her flat when they married, and so she has not even changed residence over the course of her life. When she was young she took classes and worked up a resume, but each time she got close to finding employment, Kent persuaded her that she was needed more at home, and so she has never had a job. Not once.

So after decades of marriage she decided not to notice the perfume on his shirt collar when she did the laundry, even though she herself does not wear scent of any kind. But when the woman phoned her home to tell her that her husband had had a heart attack, it became too obvious, too humiliating, and once she knew he was going to recover she tossed some things in a bag and got herself gone.

Now she wants a job, because she is afraid that otherwise she will die alone and no one will miss her. When you don’t show up for work, people notice, and she doesn’t want to pass from the Earth unnoticed and unmourned.

In the beginning some of the most hilarious passages involve socially clumsy, rude, or outrageous things that Britt-Marie does or says without intending harm. She’s clueless, but the further into the story we delve, the more we see more. We see that she is angry, too; she’s afraid of her own anger.

Although she has been taught through lifelong experience that her own needs should come last and that others should occupy the limelight, the residents of Borg, many of whom have plenty of quirks of their own, teach her that she has more value than she had previously realized.

They like her.

As the story progresses, all sorts of unforeseen twists and turns present themselves, and our formerly obnoxious protagonist turns out to have a tremendous amount of heart. I was watching to see whether the plot would become cloying or formulaic, but it never happened. And although the ending seemed a tiny bit contrived, at the same time I liked what it represented.

To learn more, you have to get the book and read it. And here there is great news: this book is available to the public, just released May 3, 2016. Highly recommended to all readers that are female or have women in their lives that mean anything at all to them. Seriously.

Love for Lydia, by H.E. Bates*****

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loveforlydiaHE Bates wrote before, during, and after World War II. Many readers came to his work after seeing a televised version of it.  It was different for me. I am fond of excellent fiction, military history, and short stories, and when I cruised Net Galley and found The Flying Officer X and Other Stories, I took a chance and scored a copy. Once I had read those, I knew I would want to read more of his work when I could. So although I came to this outstanding novel in a different way than most readers, I have to tell you that I loved it every bit as much as they did. Thank you Net Galley and Bloomsbury Reader for the complimentary DRC.  I read multiple books at a time, and I feel a bit sorry for others I read at the same time I read this, because almost everything else looks shabby next to Bates’s work. Those that enjoy great literary fiction, romance, and historical fiction—which this technically isn’t, since it was written during that time rather than later, but the feeling it generates is similar—should get a copy. Once the reader opens it, she is destined to be lost to all other purposes until the last page is turned.

This spellbinding story will be released digitally Thursday, May 12, 2016.

The setting is a small town in Britain, a town with a tannery and small farms. One great house surrounded by beautiful gardens stands aloof from the rest; it houses two elderly single women and their alcoholic brother.

Then Lydia, their niece, comes to live with them.

Lydia’s arrival is cloaked in mystery. She doesn’t talk about her mother. The aunts encourage the belief that Lydia is an orphan, but we later learn that isn’t really true. And at first Lydia, who has been cocooned so carefully that she has no social graces nor any real wardrobe, futzing around in clothing that looks suspiciously like that of her elderly aunts, really needs a trustworthy young mentor close to her own age. After having eyed the local population, the aunts send for the protagonist, young Mr. Richards, whose family fortunes have slid to terrible places. Once the proud owners of considerable farmland, the Richards family is now cramped in a noisy flat that shares a wall—and the attendant noises and smells—with the tannery.

Perhaps the thing the aunts like most about young Richards is his great fondness for flowers, an unusual trait in a young man at the party-animal age. He endears himself to the aunt that gives her attention to the landscaping, commenting on the traits of flowers and making suggestions that create an instant bond between young man and old lady, but Richards is unprepared for what awaits him.

The aunts want him to meet Lydia, and they wonder whether he might take her skating on the lake. He agrees to do so. Lydia has never skated and starts out as if she were a colt trying to navigate a frozen surface, all arms and legs floundering, falling. So he is unprepared for the grace and dignity that soon possess her. They fall in love, and young love proves to be the school of hard knocks for our young man, as it is for so many.

None of this brief outline can provide Bates’s magical facility with words. This blog has reviewed hundreds of books—all read and reviewed by me—and this is one that stands out and that has stood the test of time. Bates transports us to a place we have never been and makes us feel we know it, and its inhabitants, intimately. He also lights on issues like social class and the way those with lifelong privilege might treat those without. But this is not a social justice campaign, it’s a brilliant work of fiction that sizzles in places and scorches in others. Character development is spectacularly done; I have had my nose in half a dozen books since I finished reading this one, yet I still think of Blackie, of Tom, of Nancy, of Alex, and oh of course, of Lydia. The ending is bittersweet yet strangely satisfying.

The vocabulary level that makes for such tremendous depth of character and setting also requires a strong facility for the English language on the part of the reader. Although there are no explicit sex scenes, I don’t recommend handing this novel to your love-struck sixteen-year-old as summer reading unless he or she reads at the college level.

I dare you to find a more engaging love story than this one.

The Kaminsky Cure, by Christopher New***

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thekaminskycureThe Kaminsky Cure is a satire of Nazi Germany previously published and now offered anew in digital format. Thanks go to Open Road Integrated Media and Net Galley for the invitation to read and review, and for the DRC, which I received free of charge. This title is available to purchase now.

Who would have thought it possible to satirize such a terrible time and have it come out in anything other than terrible taste? But New carries it off, using a pre-school aged child in a mixed family—with one Jewish parent and one Anglo parent—as his narrator. Several times the precocious tot points out aspects of his own narrative that are actually impossible, as for example when the child tells us exactly what is contained in something written and then blandly points out that he cannot read yet. It just makes it funnier.

The appealing thing about this novel is that it brings up the reality which should be obvious to any thinking person that has paid any attention to this particular time and place: most Germans as well as Austrians were entirely in favor of Hitler’s takeover, and although there were Jewish families, many of them in fact, that wanted out of Nazi-occupied Europe as quickly as they could go, there were others that had never embraced their culture and had converted to Christianity in some cases generations earlier; and such is the case with our protagonist’s family, which wants only to pass itself off as Aryan so that it can join in the party. Young Martin, the protagonist’s older brother, longs to become a member of the fearsome SS, Hitler’s storm-troopers. Ah, the uniforms! The ferocity! The authority!

Our toddler-narrator, meanwhile, observes his own family with platonic remove, contemplating which members have violated one edict or another and should therefore be turned in to the authorities. After all, that’s one of the things he has learned in school. Children are the future, and it’s up to them to weed out those older folk that fail to comply with important social changes.

It’s what Hitler would want him to do.

There’s one twist and then another, but overall I found that the story’s momentum lost steam as it progressed, because there was really just one joke here, and it could only be played so many ways before it became repetitious. Nevertheless, it’s wholly original, and when faced with an event as horrific as the Holocaust, one either has to laugh or cry.

And amazingly, New has created a way to help us laugh, at least for a little while.

Everyone Brave is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave*****

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everyonebraveisforgivenThis is one of those rare novels that I have passed by multiple times despite all the buzz it has generated, because it looked as if it was out of my wheelhouse. A socialite. Pssh. A British officer. Sure. But eventually the enormous buzz among readers and booksellers made me curious. The last time I had this experience, the novel was The Goldfinch, and once I had begun it I gasped almost audibly at what I had almost let slip away from me. And so it is with Cleave’s brilliant novel, historical fiction mixed with more than a dash of romance.  I was lucky enough to get the DRC free of charge in exchange for an honest review; thank you Simon and Schuster and also Net Galley. This luminous novel is available to the public Tuesday, May 3, and you have to read it. It is destined to become a classic.

Our protagonists are Mary North and Alistair Heath; she is dating his best friend, and he is dating hers.  The night before he is to leave to serve in the British armed forces, a moment flashes between them in which they know they want to be together; when he leaves, each grapples with issues of personal loyalty when thinking of the other.

If talent were a mountain, then Cleave would be Everest. If talent were an island, Cleave would not be Malta, but rather all of Britain. And Cleave’s use of word play, first to show how undaunted British youth were by the challenges ahead, and later in a sharper way as the characters learn terrible things and develop a new definition of what courage looks like, is bafflingly brilliant, the rare sort that makes lesser writers hang their heads and understand—this will never be you.

My primary reservation about this novel was that it dealt with the social elite, and my first thought was oh heavens no.  That poor rich girl is going to have to suck it up like everybody else. But I underestimated Cleave and what he was about to take on; Mary, Alistair, and the secondary characters around them begin with a set of assumptions that under his unerring pen seem not only reasonable, but the sort of normal to which their entire lives have accustomed them. Their cavalier approach to the war, from those that serve from those like Tom who at the outset, believe they will “give it a miss”, is the entitlement that has cradled and preserved them from the realities of the greater world all their lives.

And it’s about to change.

 

Any other city would be chewing its knuckles and digging a hole to hide in.    Alistair    wanted to yell at people: The bullets actually work, you know! What they did not understand was that the city could be extinguished. That every eligible person could die with the same baffled expression that he had seen on the first dead of the war, in those earliest shocking days before the men had learned to expect it. I’m so sorry—I think I’m actually hit.

 

In turns amusing, poignant, tender, and heartbreaking, this is a novel you will want to reserve hours of your most private moments to read. You may find yourself taking an unexpected sick day so that you can finish it. Based on the overall story of the author’s grandfather with changes, added details, and embellishments, all of which the protagonists would agree are first rate, Everyone Brave is Forgiven is an unforgettable story of love, war, and innocence lost.

 

Redemption Road, by John Hart ***-****

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redemptionroadJohn Hart has  loyal readers, but until a friend mentioned his name to me I had not read his work. Thanks go to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for the DRC, which I received free in return for an honest review. This title is available to the public May 3, 2016. There are some partial spoilers below that give up events midway through the book, but of course the ending is kept secret so that you may find it for yourself. I rate this novel 3.5 stars and round upward.

Our protagonist is Elizabeth Black, a cop burdened by her profound attachment to Adrian Wall, a former cop sent to prison for a murder she is certain he did not commit, and also to Gideon, the child of the murder victim. On the day Wall is released from prison, Gideon, now an adolescent, lies in wait for him, prepared to shoot the man he believes killed his mother.

All hell breaks loose, and once more Liz is immersed in the case. She has served as surrogate mother to Gideon since his mother’s death; his father is not fit to raise a child, and so she has quietly slipped in and out of that family’s home, preparing meals, purchasing the child’s clothes. She can’t step back from this case, even when ordered by her superiors to do so.

Hart is a gorgeous prose stylist, and his pacing is unbeatable. He does use one very old plot device, and it, along with the subscript, which I will discuss in a minute, and the absolutely impossible denouement are the reasons the final star-and-a-half is denied.  In addition, there is a place in the story—I won’t spoil the specifics—in which Liz is stark naked and leaps into a car without a stitch of clothing on, and no one finds this remarkable. It appears that the writer had intended to get her dressed and overlooked this detail, as did editors.Hart’s facility with setting is lush and matchless; the violence in this novel, thoroughly visceral, tipped my “ick” button a couple of times, and for this reason and others, I may not return to his work. But his talent and skill are unquestionable.

A minor character of considerable interest is the attorney Liz hires to defend those close to her, a very elderly local courtroom legend known as Crybaby Jones. Every time Crybaby said or did anything, my mind lit up like Christmas, it was so endearing and entertaining. I wish he had been given a larger role in the story, but for the most part he was relegated to the sidelines.

Another character of interest is the prison warden, who functions as a local kingpin and terrorizes those around him into instant submission. I disliked the way this character was shaped, because it gave the author a handy way to dismiss the over-the-top violence by local cops and prison guards as the product of one terrible man’s dominance, which gives the reader the false but comforting assurance that when cops get bad, it’s an anomaly. Hart may believe this; I don’t. And this is a part of the subscript that grated on my nerves. Early in the story Liz reflects that it is oh so hard to be a cop “since Ferguson”, sounding the message that those of us that hold cops accountable and question the deaths of children and other weaponless civilians is cruelly unfair to those that wield the badge. My e-reader comment: “Oh boo hoo. Poor poor cops.”

Because this writer spins a good thriller, I attempted to overlook this and another troubling aspect of the subscript, but the second message was hammered home again, and again, and again, the message that any woman that terminates a pregnancy is a baby killer. He goes after this one long and loudly, with Liz recalling the day she “killed her baby” in a sleazy trailer park abortion. If we’d just had the trailer and no other abortion reference it could have been interpreted as a message that abortion should be safe and legal in every state in the USA, including North Carolina, but that is clearly not the author’s intent. He has her tearfully remembering what would have been her due date had she delivered the “child”; she marks her embryo’s birthday-that-wasn’t every year, and mawkishly speculates about what he –oh yes, she knows its gender, although this is not even scientifically possible until the fifth month of a pregnancy– might have liked, his possible activities, preferences, and yada yada.

Have you had an abortion, or known someone that has? I can think of half a dozen women without trying hard, and this is just not how it goes, folks. Nor should it be.

Fiction writers often use story to drive home a political message, because story is such a strong device and delivers such powerful feelings. In the hands of friends, it is admirable and welcome. In the hands of those that wish to dictate what a woman may or may not do with her body, and in the hands of those that would restore the status quo of police terror over Black men and other vulnerable members of our society, it is galling.

To sum up, Hart has created a work of stunning prose and imagery and tremendous suspense. If you lean far enough to the right to be unaffected or even galvanized by the subscript, then this is your book.