Linda M. Castellitto

NonfictionMemoir

The Erratics

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics is a beautifully crafted, unblinkingly honest, often darkly funny lament for a loving family that never was. The author’s mother was a cruel and abusive narcissist, her father an enabler and Laveau-Harvie and her younger sister the casualties of their parents’ twisted way of inhabiting the world.

Their family home is in Okotoks, a rural area in Alberta, Canada, where an enormous ancient boulder called the Okotoks Erratic “dominates the landscape, roped off and isolated, the danger it presents to anyone palpable and documented on the signs posted around it.” Laveau-Harvie describes Okotoks and the Rocky Mountains that soar above it with wonder and grace. She movingly conveys the ways in which the landscape offered her solace as a child and inspires resolve as an adult. But to survive the trauma of her early years, she first had to leave—moving to France and eventually settling in faraway Australia. “When I could, I took to fleeing ever farther, a moving target working at making herself fainter in the cross hairs, while my sister stood her ground, solid in appearance and stern, modeling her life like play dough. Neither strategy was successful,” she writes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Vicki Laveau-Harvie discusses the long and winding path to publishing her stunning first book.

In 2006, Laveau-Harvie received a fateful phone call at her home in Sydney: Her elderly mother had broken her hip and was in the hospital, leaving her father alone in her parents' grand mansion. He was also, the author learned, timorous and frail as a result of his wife starving and isolating him. After being estranged from their parents for nearly 20 years, the sisters traveled to Okotoks in an effort to protect their father and procure the appropriate care for their mother.

Their six-year journey of navigating endless health care bureaucracy while revisiting familial pain makes for an engrossing and fascinating read, one that moves with the ebbs and flows of Laveau-Harvie’s supressed, impressionistic memories. She writes, “My past is not merely faded, or camouflaged under the dust of years. It’s not there, and I know a blessing in disguise when I see one.” Through this protective, gauzy “fog” beams the author’s light: an unflinching and empathetic memoir of the collision between past trauma and new outrage, dotted with precious moments of rueful levity and fleeting beauty.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics is a beautifully crafted, unblinkingly honest, often darkly funny lament for a loving family that never was.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

In her third work of historical fiction, Kathleen Rooney takes her gift for inhabiting fascinating real-life figures in an exciting new direction. Both of the narrators in Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey were lauded for their heroic actions in World War I: Major Charles Whittlesey, leader of the famous “Lost Battalion,” and Cher Ami, a brave homing pigeon. As in her previous novels, 2012’s Robinson Alone and 2017’s bestselling Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, Rooney provides historical context that is at once sweeping and specific, and her affinity for research is evident in details both lovely and harrowing.

Charming, contemplative Cher Ami speaks from a display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where her taxidermied body has been behind glass since her 1919 death. She reflects on her homing-pigeon training in Britain and her service in WWI, where she crossed paths with the major. Charles, an intelligent and kind man suffering from PTSD, harks back to his prewar life in New York City, where he had a law partnership and spent evenings visiting neighborhoods where he could meet other closeted gay men.

The two share their experiences of a 1918 battle in France’s Argonne Forest, where their battalion was trapped for five terrifying days. Cut off from supplies, surrounded by the enemy and, in a final insult, pelted with shells fired by fellow American troops, they were saved by Cher Ami's delivery of a crucial message. The press and the Army showered Charles and Cher Ami with honors and praise, but memories linger: the trenches, filled with danger and death; institutional incompetence that left the soldiers vulnerable; and the anguish of seeing feathered and human friends die.

Rooney makes a strong case for considering alternatives to war, pondering who we call heroes and why, and offering animals more empathy and respect. This is a creative, heartfelt, edifying reimagining of an important event in World War I history, as seen through the eyes of two extraordinary individuals.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Kathleen Rooney illuminates the unlikely heroes of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

In her third work of historical fiction, Kathleen Rooney takes her gift for inhabiting fascinating real-life figures in an exciting new direction. Both of the narrators in Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey were lauded for their heroic actions in World War I: Major Charles Whittlesey, leader of the famous “Lost Battalion,” and Cher Ami, a brave homing pigeon.
NonfictionHistory

The Unidentified

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Most of us have heard about the mythical city of Atlantis, the elusive Bigfoot and the UFO hotbed of Area 51. But where did these stories originate? Is there any truth to them? And why are we still talking about them decades, even centuries, after their tales were first told? In The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the Unexplained, Colin Dickey strives to answer those very questions—while introducing readers to other lesser known yet delightfully named phenomena along the way, like the 1876 Great Kentucky Meat Shower.

Dickey’s previous book, 2016’s popular Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, focused on Americans’ fascination with the paranormal. Here, he hits the road again, this time turning his critical and clever eye on enduring stories about strange beasts, alien visitors and other oddities. In this compelling historical and cultural analysis of human nature, in terms of where myths come from and why they persist, Dickey cites the historians, credible or otherwise, who have made conspiracy theories and UFOs their life’s work, and shares his take on their motives and popularity. He also examines why “fringe beliefs” have increased in recent years, contributing to “a rising sentiment of distrust in science, in academic institutions, and in government.”

Dickey begins his engaging and impressively researched journey in his home state of California, at Mount Shasta—believed to have a secret city, Lemuria, inside. He notes that, like Lemuria, the lost city of Atlantis (first described by Plato) is a utopia. Both are “places that don’t exist, that we can fill with meaning precisely because there are no facts against which to measure that meaning.” As he brings readers to New Jersey (the New Jersey Devil: once a hoax creature, now a hockey team name), Montana (the 1968 Montana Snowman sightings) and more, he points to the human tendency toward discomfort with things that don’t make sense and “the automatic obsession to explain [them].”

Scientists did try to explain the Great Kentucky Meat Shower . . . but I won’t spoil the outcome here. Suffice it to say, Dickey found a sort of inspiration in the tale. Ultimately, when it comes to the unexplainable—meaty or otherwise—he exhorts readers to “cling to the wonder, the possibilities, without allowing your doubt to become its own certainty.”

Most of us have heard about the mythical city of Atlantis, the elusive Bigfoot and the UFO hotbed of Area 51. But where did these stories originate? Is there any truth to them? And why are we still talking about them decades, even centuries, after…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Home Before Dark

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

We’ve all heard the saying “You can’t go home again,” but Maggie Holt decides to do it anyway in Riley Sager’s supernatural haunted-house thriller, Home Before Dark.

The 30-year-old interior designer’s father, Ewan, recently died and, to her surprise, left her a house she didn’t realize he still owned: Baneberry Hall, a beautiful Victorian manse located in the woods of Vermont. Twenty-five years ago, Maggie’s parents bought the house for a song because of its tragic and violent history. They optimistically set out to make happy memories there together but after 20 days in the house they fled in terror. Unfortunately, Ewan’s bestselling memoir about their traumatic experiences achieved massive fame and notoriety that have been dogging and defining Maggie ever since. Renovating and selling the gothic mansion seems like an excellent opportunity for her to reckon with her past and put Baneberry Hall behind her at last—especially since she doesn’t remember the events Ewan wrote about (and is highly skeptical that they ever happened in the first place). Sure, her father made her promise to never return to the house, but if you don’t believe in ghosts, they can’t scare or harm you, right?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Riley Sager shares how he crafted a literary hall of mirrors.

Sager fans know better, of course, and therein lies the fun. As in his previous bestselling thrillers (Final Girls, The Last Time I Lied and Lock Every Door), the author puts a fresh, clever spin on horror tropes, this time with echoes of The Amityville Horror and “The Haunting of Hill House.” And he amps up the tension by alternating chapters of Ewan’s book with Maggie’s musings, thus putting the past and present on a collision course that readers can, but our heroine cannot, see.

Home Before Dark is a compelling and layered mix of taut psychological suspense, genuinely scary haunted-house terrors and the vagaries of memory, capped off with an inventive and satisfyingly wild ending.

We’ve all heard the saying “You can’t go home again,” but Maggie Holt decides to do it anyway in Riley Sager’s supernatural haunted-house thriller, Home Before Dark.

Mystery & SuspenseThriller

The Last Flight

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Julie Clark’s The Last Flight is a delicious thrill ride of a read. It’s got swapped identities, minute-by-minute suspense, shadowy figures, murder mystery and enough twists and coincidences to make things exciting yet frighteningly realistic.

Clark’s two protagonists, Eva James and Claire Cook, take turns narrating their separate lives before and after they decide, together, to abandon them. When Claire fell in love with her husband, Rory, a handsome and wealthy would-be senator from a powerful family, it was almost a relief. While she’d excelled at Vassar and had a great job at Christie’s, she was still devastated by the deaths of her mother and sister. Rory was charming, with a glittering life—and, Claire realized not long after they wed, a penchant for control and abuse. She longs to escape, and knows she’s got to do it just right; she has a bad feeling about the untimely demise of Rory’s previous girlfriend.

She puts a plan in motion, only to encounter a major last-minute problem. And then, as she muses on her options in a JFK airport bar, Eva joins her and shares her desire for a new, better life. After a few tentative jokes about the movie Freaky Friday, the women decide to do a swap of their own. They exchange clothes, phones and tickets, with Eva taking Claire’s place on a flight to Puerto Rico, and Claire boarding Eva’s flight to California.

Upon touchdown in Oakland, Claire is shocked by the TV news: the Puerto Rico flight crashed, presumably leaving no survivors—and suddenly, she has more choices than she did before. Alas, assuming Eva’s identity has its own set of problems, as it turns out she, too, was at the mercy of dangerous men.

The Last Flight is a suspenseful, timely tale about smart, strong women who support one another in their determination to not just survive, but also thrive, uncertainty and risk be damned.

Julie Clark’s The Last Flight is a delicious thrill ride of a read. It’s got swapped identities, minute-by-minute suspense, shadowy figures, murder mystery and enough twists and coincidences to make things exciting yet frighteningly realistic.

Clark’s two protagonists, Eva James and Claire Cook, take turns…

Mystery & SuspenseThriller

The Girl from Widow Hills

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

At just 6 years old, Arden Maynor was outside sleepwalking when a flash flood swept her away. Residents of her small Kentucky town searched for days, her mother made on-camera pleas and the national media broadcast it all. The country breathed a sigh of relief when Arden was found—and on every anniversary of that day, the media spotlight found her and her mother over and over again. The relentless attention made Arden feel hunted, “like nothing more than a character brought to life by my mother’s book.”

And so, in Megan Miranda’s The Girl from Widow Hills, we get to know the Arden of 20 years later: now 26, she goes by Olivia Wells and lives in North Carolina, where she has a job she loves. She’s finally beginning to feel secure in her life’s rhythms, even forging new friendships—but then, one horrible night, she sleepwalks outside and awakens with a bloodied body at her feet. Is the looming 20th anniversary stirring up tamped-down trauma? Or is someone from the past trying to torment her anew?

Newspaper articles, transcripts, book excerpts and other artifacts paint a fuller picture of the rescue and its aftermath, including conspiracy theories and bizarre expectations from those obsessed with the little girl. Step by suspenseful step, Miranda lays a path for readers to follow as Olivia tries to separate dreams and reality, fear and fact—with a tenacious local detective not far behind.

The Girl from Widow Hills is a creepy, compelling portrait of a life forever warped by unwanted fame, a timely theme in this era of internet celebrity and the fall from grace that often follows. (There are strong echoes of the real life 1987 “Baby Jessica” media explosion, too, wherein a toddler fell deep into a Texas well and the nation breathlessly tuned in to CNN’s live broadcast of the tension-filled, successful rescue effort.) It’s a shivery kind of fun to wonder along with Olivia whether those close to her should be trusted or feared, and to urge her on as she races to unravel the past without unraveling her sanity. She may have been rescued all those years ago, but now, only she can save herself.

At just 6 years old, Arden Maynor was outside sleepwalking when a flash flood swept her away. Residents of her small Kentucky town searched for days, her mother made on-camera pleas and the national media broadcast it all. The country breathed a sigh of relief…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Distant Dead

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

The small town of Lovelock, Nevada, is nestled in brush-dotted hills that crouch under unending blue sky—an eerie desert landscape that sets a tone of creeping dread in Heather Young’s The Distant Dead.

Young, an Edgar Award nominee for her first book, 2016’s The Lost Girls, has crafted a story that begins with a horrific discovery and expands to explore the weight of familial obligation, the far-reaching devastation of drug addiction and the ways in which guilt and boredom can curdle into something much more sinister. And so: Sixth-grader Sal Prentiss goes to the fire station to report that he’s found a burned body while, in another part of town, social studies teacher Nora Wheaton is wondering why her colleague Adam Merkel hasn’t shown up to work. He’s a math teacher and it’s Pi Day—surely he wouldn’t miss the opportunity to have math-centric fun with his class? No one else seems very concerned, not least because the enigmatic Adam keeps to himself and doesn’t engage in gossip, but Nora can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong. Alas, her instincts are validated when she learns that Adam is the victim.

It’s incomprehensible; what enemies could he possibly have? He’s been very kind to Sal, teaching the boy chess at lunchtime and helping him navigate a hard life with his taciturn uncles on an isolated ranch outside of town. Nora’s not confident the relatively inexperienced police will be able to solve the case, and she’s also been feeling unfulfilled, due to a dream deferred: she went to college for anthropology but left early to care for her argumentative alcoholic father. She decides to investigate Adam’s death, and Young shuttles the reader back and forth in time as she unfurls the characters’ relationships and life paths, with all their secrets and hopes and disappointments.

The suspense is slow and steady in this meditative, artistic take on the murder mystery—the author’s language is poetic, and her contemplation of the corrosiveness of suppressed emotion is both sympathetic and impatient: When will people learn? This is an unusual, compelling portrait of a people and a place where the future always seems impossibly far away.

The small town of Lovelock, Nevada, is nestled in brush-dotted hills that crouch under unending blue sky—an eerie desert landscape that sets a tone of creeping dread in Heather Young’s The Distant Dead.

Young, an Edgar Award nominee for her first book, 2016’s The…

Children's & YAPicture Book

Joy

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Kittens are furry balls of unbridled energy, careening around the house at lightning speed and then plunging into sleep wherever they happen to land. They’re adorable and fearless agents of household delight and chaos. In Joy, Yasmeen Ismail and Jenni Desmond winningly capture kittenhood for an aptly titled read-aloud. 

A gray tabby kitten named Joy bats and flings around a red ball of yarn with abandon: “Jingle jangle, wriggle wrangle, in a tangle.” Desmond’s swooping lines expertly and entertainingly evoke a kitten in perpetual motion, a smile always on her face, the brightly colored house her playground. A stripey brown cat and an enormous dog observe Joy’s hijinks with tolerant amusement, perhaps recalling their own wild younger days—until, unable to resist, they join in on the fun. 

And then! Joy takes a tumble and scares herself into stillness. Mama Cat gives Joy a soothing hug while Dog stands supportively by as they tell her, “I think you’re going to be just fine. Give yourself a little time.” Readers will cheer to watch as, fortified by this reassurance, Joy recovers lickety-split and triumphantly rubber-bands around the room once again.

Ismail and Desmond’s take on tiny felines is hilarious and sweet. Ismail’s giggle-inducing onomatopoeic rhymes wend their way through Desmond’s kinetic (kitten-ic?) artwork, as Joy’s exclamatory inner monologue amusingly punctuates the whirlwindy, somersaulting sequences. Desmond’s heavy pencil strokes are enervated by her vivid watercolors, and she uses white space to excellent effect during Joy’s manic moments, providing necessary breathing room for zooming and boinging galore. 

Joy is a warm and funny testament to the energy of youth, the rejuvenating powers of a comforting hug and the resilience of those who feel supported with love.

Kittens are furry balls of unbridled energy, careening around the house at lightning speed and then plunging into sleep wherever they happen to land. They’re adorable and fearless agents of household delight and chaos. In Joy, Yasmeen Ismail and Jenni Desmond winningly capture kittenhood for…

FictionThriller

Take Me Apart

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Renowned photographer Miranda Brand was just 37 when she died by suicide in 1993, leaving behind her husband, Jake, a painter, and her 11-year-old son, Theo. The news stunned the art world—after years of struggle, eccentric and daring Miranda seemed to be once again hitting her stride—and the small beach town of Callinas, California, in which the family lived.

In 2017, erstwhile copyeditor Kate Aitken has been hired by Theo to archive his mother’s personal effects, a job that piques Kate’s journalistic curiosity and offers the potential for healing after sexual harassment drove her to flee her job in New York City. But in Sara Sligar’s engrossing and powerful debut novel, Take Me Apart, this exciting opportunity soon becomes something much darker.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Sara Sligar on the American cult of celebrity.

As Kate dives deep into the artifacts of Miranda’s life (including a lyrically written yet deeply disturbing diary), she becomes consumed by Miranda’s pain and neglects her own. It doesn’t help that Aunt Louise, who’s hosting Kate’s stay, is an accomplished manipulator, adept at pecking away at her niece in search of juicy details. As Kate fends off the town gossips, she struggles to keep her own counsel. Despite a nondisclosure agreement, she’s begun snooping around the house and Callinas in search of answers about Miranda’s death. Was it actually suicide, or is someone—Theo, the police, former friends, a smart but sleazy gallerist—keeping deadly secrets?

The novel is written in alternating timelines and perspectives, with well-researched nods to the 1970s-1980s Manhattan art scene and keenly felt deep dives into Miranda’s unraveling mental state as she contends with her husband’s increasing jealousy and resentment. As the past unfolds via Miranda’s flotsam-and-jetsam memories and Kate’s increasingly feverish investigation, Sligar prompts readers to muse on the ways in which artists often suffer greatly for their creations, especially if they are women. She also, with great empathy, explores the potentially devastating effects of untreated mental illness and the downsides of ambition, success and fame.

Take Me Apart is rife with fascinating dichotomies—gossip is corrosive but sometimes useful; trauma is torturous but may inspire powerful art; success is desirable but exhausting to maintain—and offers a fresh look at the legacies we leave behind, in all their painful and powerful humanity.

Renowned photographer Miranda Brand was just 37 when she died by suicide in 1993, leaving behind her husband Jake, a painter, and 11-year-old son Theo. The news stunned the art world—after years of struggle, eccentric and daring Miranda seemed to be once again hitting her stride—and the small beach town of Callinas, California, in which the family lived.

Children's & YAPicture Book

A Green New Day

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Oh, the joy of wandering around outside on a lush summer day!

Antoinette Portis’ A New Green Day captures perfectly the delight of exploring the natural world with a curious mind and an open heart. In the author-illustrator’s inventive hands, everyday things become extraordinary and the prosaic becomes poetic. A green leaf’s veins strikingly emulate the tree from which the leaf fell, and a rainstorm becomes “a chorus of a million tiny voices.”

From sunrise to sunset, clever riddles create a call-and-response between the book and its readers, their proxy a little girl who skips about the pages, long braids a-twirl. The solutions to each riddle revealed though the turning of a page. “I’m a comma in the long, long sentence of the stream,” says . . . the tadpole! And “a candy sucked smooth in the river’s mouth?” That’s a smooth speckled stone. The guessing-game aspect of the book offers a lovely way to spark discussion and wonderment, suitable for younger kids who are only beginning to learn about nature, as well as older kids who will get a kick out of debating the answers to each of the questions.

Portis invites young readers (and the adults who may share the book with them) to look at things in an entirely new way, to challenge their impressions of the familiar and allow for new interpretations of what they see. Her spare yet powerful verses are sure to spark an increased engagement with our environment, which will in turn serve to make nature more relevant to curious children.

Fittingly, a range of textures in the illustrations make the book a visual feast. There are concentric ripples in water and tiny grains of sand, sharp slices of lightning and blurry daubs of mud. In A New Green Day, weather and light and living things coexist as they inhabit and create each new tomorrow. It’s an engaging tribute to our surprising and awe-inspiring natural world, an invitation to get outside and experience each day through the lens of our vivid, ever-changing imaginations.

Oh, the joy of wandering around outside on a lush summer day!

Antoinette Portis’ A New Green Day captures perfectly the delight of exploring the natural world with a curious mind and an open heart. In the author-illustrator’s inventive hands, everyday things become extraordinary and…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Echo Mountain

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Twelve-year-old Ellie feels at home in the Maine woods of Lauren Wolk’s Echo Mountain. Her parents lost their home in the Great Depression and were forced to move, along with many neighbors, to the woods, where Ellie learned to hunt, fish and start a fire. Now, Ellie’s skills and confidence put her at odds with her resentful mother and older sister, who miss their former life in town.

Wolk vividly invokes the shock of losing an old way of life—of trading sidewalks for pine-needle paths, of swapping paper currency for barter with haircuts, eggs and firewood. She also sensitively conveys the swirl of emotions surrounding the accident that has put Ellie’s dad in a coma for months and left his family in a state of suspended grief. Ellie’s mother and sister blame Ellie for the accident, and Ellie’s mother copes by discouraging her daughter’s adaptability and curiosity, worrying that she’s becoming too wild.

Despite these hardships, Ellie remains determined to use her skills to keep her family safe and fed and to find a way to wake up her father. Her dubious yet logical efforts on this front are humorous and heartbreaking—and, just maybe, hopeful. Ellie’s life contains some big mysteries, as well. Who is leaving her beautifully carved miniature figurines? Might the “hag” who lives up the mountain know how to heal her father?

Fans of Wolk’s previous novels, including the Newbery Honor book Wolf Hollow, will once again relish the author’s evocative and touching language (Ellie cuts her hair “because the trees kept trying to comb it”) and her gift for revisiting history through the lens of fulsome and fascinating characters. In this complex, memorable novel, Wolk explores themes of social responsibility, modern versus traditional medicine, biological versus chosen family and more. 

Through it all, the book pays heartfelt tribute to resilience and resourcefulness. As seen through the indefatigable Ellie’s wise young eyes, no detail, emotion, creature or scrap of fabric on Echo Mountain is too small to be without value.

Twelve-year-old Ellie feels at home in the Maine woods of Lauren Wolk’s Echo Mountain. Her parents lost their home in the Great Depression and were forced to move, along with many neighbors, to the woods, where Ellie learned to hunt, fish and start a fire.…

NonfictionMemoirEssays

My Life as a Villainess

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Laura Lippman does not feel bad about her neck. Like, at all. In fact, she writes in My Life as a Villainess, “I have decided, at the age of 60, that I am a goddamn knockout.” She is, objectively, but that statement’s about more than her appealing physical self; it’s a celebration of finally shedding decades of societally induced self-consciousness about food and her body. The essay in which it resides, “The Whole 60,” with its “positivity, damn it” vibe, is a fitting kickoff to a smart, thoughtful, sometimes vulnerable, always witty collection of essays. Some are new, some previously published, and together they offer an overview of a very special life so far.

Lippman is aware of and thankful for said specialness, and she acknowledges her good fortune often. She adores her brilliant cultural-phenomenon-creator husband, David Simon, known for TV shows “The Wire” and “Treme,” et al. She loves her charming 10-year-old, who made Lippman a mom at 50; is fiercely grateful for a dazzling nanny named Yaya; and treasures her friends, even if she’s pretty sure she isn’t such a great friend to them sometimes.

Before she was known for her critically lauded crime novels (her Tess Monaghan series, 12 books and counting, plus 10 standalones), Lippman was a newspaper reporter for 20 years. In “Waco Kid,” she writes of her early career struggles as a newly minted reporter adjusting to the alien Texas landscape, aghast at endemic racism but also thrilled at her burgeoning love of movies. Her later years as a reporter in her beloved city of Baltimore honed her prodigious writing and editing skills, but she’s still pissed that her growing off-the-clock career as a novelist was held against her (as opposed to male colleagues, who were praised for similar endeavors). In “Game of Crones,” she’s hilariously ticked off about menopause, too, and drops trash-talk and name-drop tidbits here and there like so many tasty, snappy breadcrumbs. There’s also a lovely remembrance of Anthony Bourdain (“Fine Bromance”) and a paean to a double boiler (“Revered Ware”), a cookware-as-tribute to her late father, who was also a journalist.

With its “gleefully honest” hits of humor and willingness to take a close look at some discomfiting truths, it will come as no surprise to Lippman’s fans that My Life as a Villainess is an engaging read—an intrepid investigation of the author’s inner landscape and a raucous, no-holds-barred visit with that friend you admire for her candor, passion and unabashed nostalgia for 1980s fashion.

With its “gleefully honest” hits of humor and willingness to take a close look at some discomfiting truths, Laura Lippman’s essay collection is an engaging read.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Hid From Our Eyes

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Fans of Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Fergusson/Russ van Alstyne mysteries will be delighted to learn the Episcopalian priest and her police chief husband are back in Hid From Our Eyes.

In this ninth installment of the New York Times bestselling and award-winning series, Spencer-Fleming takes a long view of the dark side of human nature via characters who investigate three unsolved murders that span decades and haunt the lives of the residents of Millers Kill, a small town in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Each murder victim was a pretty young woman clad in a pricey party dress, found in the middle of the road with no indications of who or what caused her death.

In the present day, Russ van Alstyne is the police chief tasked with solving the latest murder; in 1972, he found a victim’s body during a motorcycle ride and became a person of interest in the ultimately unresolved case. It’s fascinating to move among the various time periods, meeting Russ when he was an angry just-returned-home Vietnam veteran and then again when he’s a calm and driven policeman. Spencer-Fleming tracks the frustrations of the law enforcement and medical professionals stymied by a lack of clues, witnesses, technology or some combination thereof. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are understandably tricky, especially among multiple eras, but Spencer-Fleming handles them with skill and ease, using secrets and revelations alike to ramp up the suspense and create a chain of investigation and mentorship among the police chiefs of each successive generation.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Julia Spencer-Fleming on exploring questions of faith and mentorship.

She also writes with compassion for those who struggle, whether with PTSD, financial strain or, like Clare, finding a satisfying balance between nervous new motherhood and a demanding job (while maintaining sobriety and pitching in as a dogged amateur sleuth, to boot). Hid From Our Eyes lets readers spend time inside the marriage of two beloved characters and follow along as they race against time to solve a confounding murder case that is threatening Millers Kill’s sense of unity and safety. The author also explores PTSD among returning veterans, small-town politics, class conflict, gender identity, religion and more in this multifaceted exploration of community and crime in a small town.

Hid From Our Eyes is an exciting return to a beloved series, as well as an intriguing entry point for readers new to the world of Russ, Clare and Millers Kill.

Fans of Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Fergusson/Russ van Alstyne mysteries will be delighted to learn the Episcopalian priest and her police chief husband are back in Hid From Our Eyes.

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