Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
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It’s Halloween night, and the K-Bar in Bolton, Montana, is well into its annual costume party. The bar is full of Elvis impersonators competing for top dress-up honors. Drinking with her friends among other costumed partygoers and over-imbibers is local college student Grace Adams, dressed up as a prom queen. She gets spooked enough by someone she has tagged as a stalker that she leaves the party to escape the real or imagined threat.

At the same time as hips are swiveling in the K-Bar, the nearby home of well-known local residents Peter and Hannah Granger is burning to the ground, leaving the remains of two unidentified bodies in the rubble as well as a heap of smoldering questions.

Enter Detective Macy Greeley, who arrives from neighboring Helena to investigate the fire and determine whether it was accident or arson. That it was an intentional act soon becomes clear, and Macy sets out to dissect the lives and relationships of the Grangers—Hannah, an artist and teacher at the local college, and Peter, a nationally popular author who teaches a popular writing workshop.

Macy must determine the identity of one of the bodies and unearth a motive behind the murder of Peter Granger, the second victim. As more becomes known about the coterie of female students who seemed to be Granger groupies, readers may begin to share Macy’s suspicions that a lot more than manuscript critique was going on in Peter Granger’s creative writing workshop. It turns out Grace was once very close to the Grangers—taking painting classes from Hannah and a spot in Peter's coveted workshop—until they had a mysterious falling out.

The detective casts a wide net to include the volatile, often troubled young women who formed the members of the writing workshop; Jessica, a despondent art department associate with mixed motives: the Grangers’ personal assistant, Cornelia; a disaffected boyfriend or two; and the malignant stalker, Jordan.

Karin Salvalaggio’s Silent Rain builds on themes in her earlier Bone Dust White (2014). Those who haven’t read the first book may find that Silent Rain involves some heavy sledding. Both Grace and Macy were front and center there, and that past influences the present in the new entry. Unfortunately it’s often referred to with roundabout, sometimes muddy allusions. The goal may be to preserve the suspense in Silent Rain, but the result for the reader is often confusion. This book is all arms and legs—presenting too many questions that dangle without resolution. This can obscure the author’s very real talent for intriguing police procedurals, a solid core that will hopefully emerge more strongly in future novels.

It’s Halloween night, and the K-Bar in Bolton, Montana, is well into its annual costume party. The bar is full of Elvis impersonators competing for top dress-up honors. Drinking with her friends among other costumed partygoers and over-imbibers is local college student Grace Adams, dressed up as a prom queen. She gets spooked enough by someone she has tagged as a stalker that she leaves the party to escape the real or imagined threat.

Scott Turow takes a bold step with his latest novel, Testimony, by moving the typical legal suspense his fans have become accustomed to out of the courtroom, as well as out of the country altogether. As the book opens, attorney Bill ten Boom’s midlife crisis is already fully underway: he’s left his job, his marriage and his home. He wants nothing more than to take a year off to “follow the sun around the world,” and “spend the evening reading everything I’ve always meant to.”

But despite his disillusionment with his former life, letting go of his quest for justice isn’t so easy. He is quickly talked into a new job as a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a war crimes tribunal. His first case involves the disappearance of some 400 refugees during the Bosnian war, who are presumed to have been buried alive. The only surviving witness, Ferko Rincic, claims an armed force was behind the atrocity, and it’s up to ten Boom to bring the culprits to justice. In a classic fish-out-of-water scenario, ten Boom must negotiate the political and judicial legalities in a global arena while also contending with a lack of cooperation from all fronts. His investigation takes him from the streets of Bosnia to the secret halls of the U.S. government itself. No one is forthcoming, the lies are palpable, and his own safety is ultimately placed into jeopardy.

While it’s not necessary to have read any of Turow’s previous novels, Testimony is a natural progression in Bill ten Boom’s story and one that adds a deep complexity to his character. Rather than present just another case in the same old setting, Turow reinvents his protagonist by taking him out of his element. At the same time, Turow reinvents himself and reasserts his own mastery of the genre.

Scott Turow takes a bold step with his latest novel, Testimony, by moving the typical legal suspense his fans have become accustomed to out of the courtroom, as well as out of the country altogether. As the book opens, attorney Bill ten Boom’s midlife crisis is already fully underway: he’s left his job, his marriage and his home. He wants nothing more than to take a year off to “follow the sun around the world,” and “spend the evening reading everything I’ve always meant to.”

Arriving just in time for summer, Rosecrans Baldwin’s new novel, The Last Kid Left, is set in a New England beach town, where the bucolic, sea-swept terrain is smote by a double murder allegedly committed by a teenager, whose girlfriend’s foray into digital, private pornography ends up going viral. Indeed, readers best beware that Baldwin’s dark and brooding narrative is by no means a light and breezy “beach read,” and on the contrary, requires an appreciation for a murder mystery/love story in which the plot is inhabited solely by a cast of antiheroes, both male and female, who are not always easy to love.

Inspired by a true 1930s crime in New England and imbued with vestiges of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—one of Baldwin’s favorite works—The Last Kid Left begins when a car, driven by 19-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr., crashes into a kitschy sculpture of a cowgirl, prompting police to discover the teen has two bodies in the trunk: a prominent town doctor and his wife. Nick is charged with the murders, thrusting his already fragile 16-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis, into a media maelstrom fueled by a hungry pack of journalists, one of whom realizes her reluctant return to her hometown of Claymore is entirely serendipitous. Meanwhile, a recently retired veteran police officer, the beleaguered recovering alcoholic Martin, finds himself drawn to the case at precisely the moment his toxic second marriage implodes. As Baldwin writes: “The clock reads four. In less than twenty-four hours the department will throw him a retirement party. Going by previous nights out, everyone will get drunk, sing his praises, wake up the next morning, and hop in a radio car and resume routine. Everyone except him.”

When Martin meets Nick’s mother, Suzanne, a fellow alcoholic who has not yet hopped aboard the recovery wagon, their shared obsession with proving the troubled teen’s innocence sparks a relationship that proves redemptive for both of them.

Without spoiling the ending of this finely wrought thriller, Baldwin’s novel steers clear of tidy endings, remaining faithful to delivering a story that ebbs and flows with the messiness of real life.

Arriving just in time for summer, Rosecrans Baldwin’s new novel, The Last Kid Left, is set in a New England beach town, where the bucolic, sea-swept terrain is smote by a double murder allegedly committed by a teenager, whose girlfriend’s foray into digital, private pornography ends up going viral. Indeed, readers best beware that Baldwin’s dark and brooding narrative is by no means a light and breezy “beach read,” and on the contrary, requires an appreciation for a murder mystery/love story in which the plot is inhabited solely by a cast of antiheroes, both male and female, who are not always easy to love.

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“All this has happened before and will happen again,” President Roslyn said in “Battlestar Galactica,” and this sentiment informs Gian Sardar’s strange, beautifully written thriller. Abby Walters, a Los Angeles estate jeweler, is being tormented by nightmares—one nightmare in particular—that have returned after 14 years. They are so vivid and terrifying that she feels the need to get to the bottom of them, once and for all.

Abby believes her dreams have something to do with her grandmother’s ring, and something to do with what happened to her grandmother’s best friend, a woman named Claire Ballantine. Claire disappeared a few years after World War II, and her husband, William, killed himself shortly thereafter. Abby’s high school reunion is in the offing anyway, so she leaves her recalcitrant scriptwriter boyfriend behind and returns to her childhood home in Minnesota. She arrives just in time to learn there’s a serial rapist on the loose, and her former high school crush is one of the detectives trying to hunt him down.

Sardar titles Abby’s chapters “Now” and alternates them with “Then” chapters, which center on the unhappy Ballantines and Eva, the girl whom the wealthy and guilty William has turned to for solace. Eva is poor, from a Minnesota nowheresville that she longs to put behind her for several reasons. William may be her ticket out, but she truly loves him. Cleverly, subtly, even insidiously, Sardar shows how Abby’s life parallels the lives of the Ballantines and the hapless Eva. What happened “then” has much to do with the nightmares Abby’s having “now”; the author seems to suggest that some catastrophes can be impressed upon the genes as indelibly as they can on the mind and the memory of them passed on. No, Abby is not a secret descendant of Eva or the Ballantines, but she is a descendant of her grandmother. Readers won’t be surprised to learn that Sardar co-wrote a memoir called Psychic Junkie.

You Were Here will make you wonder about the nature of reality even as it gives you goosebumps.

“All this has happened before and will happen again,” President Roslyn said in “Battlestar Galactica,” and this sentiment informs Gian Sardar’s strange, beautifully written thriller. Abby Walters, a Los Angeles estate jeweler, is being tormented by nightmares—one nightmare in particular—that have returned after 14 years. They are so vivid and terrifying that she feels the need to get to the bottom of them, once and for all.

If John Hughes turned The Breakfast Club into a murder mystery, it would be this delicious page-turner. Five teens enter detention, but only four come out. Simon, who runs a gossip app, dies from a suspiciously timed allergic reaction. He has made a lot of enemies in his San Diego suburb, but none with more motive than these four: Bronwyn, the straight-A good girl; Cooper, the unassuming baseball star; Nate, the drug-dealing slacker; and Addy, the enviable pretty girl. At first glance, they seem like high school clichés, but each is hiding a life-altering secret they’d do anything to protect. Either they’re all innocent, or one of them is lying, and it’s up to readers to find out.

Told in four alternating points of view, One of Us Is Lying is more than just a feisty whodunit—it’s an insightful look at high school life. Nothing drags in this fast-paced story, so give it to even the most reluctant reader and dare them not to devour it in one sitting.

 

Kimberly Giarratano is the author of Grunge Gods and Graveyards, a young adult paranormal mystery.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If John Hughes turned The Breakfast Club into a murder mystery, it would be this delicious page-turner.

If you are a fan of NBC’s “Law & Order” programs, you’ll probably be a fan of Peter Blauner’s new novel, Proving Ground. A staffer in the writer’s room, as well as a past Edgar Award-winning author, Blauner knows how to write compelling crime fiction. But, what’s more important, he knows how to portray the characters caught up in the midst of criminal misdeeds, bringing out their emotional and inner turmoil in gripping fashion.

Former Army lieutenant Nathaniel “Natty Dread” Dresden, already haunted by the death of a young Iraqi boy at his hands, is further traumatized when his father, civil rights lawyer David Dresden, is killed in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. While processing this latest disruption in his life, longtime family friend and David’s business partner, Benjamin Grimaldi, aka Ben Grimm, enlists Natty’s help in closing David’s latest high-profile case involving an Iraqi man suing the United States government for its role in torturing him about alleged terrorist activity.

The deeper Natty digs into the case—even while butting heads with the FBI and NYPD Detective Lourdes Robles, who each have their own investigations—the more secrets he uncovers about his father and Ben Grimm, putting family and friendship to the ultimate test.

Blauner easily gets into the head of each of his characters, creating a sense of sympathy and compassion for their individual traumas. But this is easily Natty’s tale, overall, and the majority of the book rightly follows his investigation and personal quest for redemption. Blauner writes crisp, detailed passages and sharp dialogue, giving the story an edgy, almost noirish quality. There’s even a fiery court scene between attorneys that would fit into almost any “Law & Order” episode.

If you are a fan of NBC’s “Law & Order” programs, you’ll probably be a fan of Peter Blauner’s new novel, Proving Ground. A staffer in the writer’s room, as well as a past Edgar Award-winning author, Blauner knows how to write compelling crime fiction. But, what’s more important, he knows how to portray the characters caught up in the midst of criminal misdeeds, bringing out their emotional and inner turmoil in gripping fashion.

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"I couldn’t put it down!" It’s an old cliché, often used to describe a book that achieves an immediate and constant hold—so much so that a reader can consume it in close to one sitting—no matter what the hour or how many chores need to be done.

Lately, such addictive reads seem to be few and far between, with many simply trying to up the ante on gore or the twist surprise factor, and most merely end up leveling the playing field.

At last, though, here’s a book that fits the bill. I Found You is addictive, and it doesn’t insult your believability quotient.

British author Lisa Jewell has penned 13 previous novels, including the creepy The Girls in the Garden (2016). In I Found You, Jewell combines several ongoing plots; all three of the storylines she’s imagined here stand on their own with intriguing characters, while at the same time seductively weaving one cloth. These stories are set in motion at differing times and places, but sooner or later they converge in a funky English seaside town called Ridinghouse Bay.

A man sits on the beach in the pouring rain: staring out to sea; soaked to the skin; silent. A middle-aged single mother sees him as she gazes from her cottage window.

Near London, a young newlywed from Kiev discovers that her husband of three weeks has gone missing. Without any new friends or understanding of British culture, she must somehow set the wheels in motion in order to discover what’s happened.

In a decades-past flashback, two teens on holiday with their family encounter an older teen who raises their suspicions in a hair-raising fashion. The scene unfolds during a visit to the beach by a traveling vintage “steam fair” (a showcase of steam-powered vehicles and machinery) that provides an appropriately seedy feel to the proceedings.

Each of these finely drawn stories tends more to gloom than to creepiness, but Jewell’s skill is such that an overriding sense of menace seeps into every page, overriding the commonplace feel of the setting. The action reaches a climax at a once-lovely seaside mansion, now overgrown with neglect—its path leading to a rusty, padlocked door hiding lonely rooms and seaswept vistas.

Jewell knows how to urge the reader on, but not in a bludgeoning way. Occasionally, the action gets a little too ordered—and perhaps winds up a bit too neatly—but by that time, readers will have enjoyed just about every minute of this captivating read.

British author Lisa Jewell's I Found You is addictive, and it doesn’t insult your believability quotient.
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If you haven’t read any books in Donna Leon’s stunning detective series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, now up to 26 books, the first installment may take a bit of getting used to as everything takes place on the water. Of course it does—her detective lives in Venice, where you pop out your door and into a boat in order to get to your destination.

In Earthly Remains, the scene shifts from Venice to its nearby islands, resulting in a subtle change in pace and atmosphere in this outstanding new entry in the series.

Brunetti’s blood pressure has run a bit awry, and he ends up embarking on a trip to regroup and relax. With his wife, Paola, in agreement with the plan, Brunetti is off to stay by himself in a villa that’s owned by a wealthy relative just a short boat trip away on the nearby island of Sant’Erasmo, in the Venetian Lagoon.

Earthly Remains takes shape as Brunetti begins his somewhat solitary stay at the unoccupied villa by making the acquaintance of the villa’s caretaker, widower Davide Casati. The two begin rowing daily together in the quiet waters of the lagoon among the shimmering reaches of nature, water and sun, burning Brunetti’s mind to quiet. He grows to love the nature that surrounds him as they row: “Brunetti had the sudden realization that, though none of this belonged to him, he belonged to all of it.”

Leon paints a picture of the incessant, encompassing warmth and the quiet reaches of nature as the two men travel out among the reeds and skimming ducks under the burnishing sun. Casati introduces his friend to the bees he keeps on a number of outlying islands where, in many of the hives, the bees are dying—to Casati’s grave distress.

The sun-blanched idyll changes in an instant when Brunetti, walking to the dock in the early morning to meet his friend, finds that both Casati and his boat are missing. Brunetti must slip back into character as a law enforcement officer as he joins in the search for the caretaker. As facts emerge, the detective is forced to re-evaluate all that he knows about the caretaker and his troubled past.

Stunning descriptions of the often tranquil surroundings mingle with an atmosphere that quickly turns malignant as troubling discoveries begin to emerge and take shape beneath the surface of the calm waters.

If you haven’t read any books in Donna Leon’s stunning detective series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, now up to 26 books, the first installment may take a bit of getting used to as everything takes place on the water. Of course it does—her detective lives in Venice, where you pop out your door and into a boat in order to get to your destination.

Paula Hawkins follows her debut smash, The Girl on the Train, with the twisty and compulsive Into the Water. Told through multiple viewpoints, the story immerses the reader in a complex web of suspense, suspicion and emotional turmoil as her characters wrestle with the recent drowning of a single mother and a teenage girl, their bodies found weeks apart at the bottom of a river known as the Drowning Pool. Both deaths are initially treated as suicides, but doubts and secrets abound, prompting speculation of another cause entirely.

Unlike The Girl on the Train, which alternated narratives from two main characters and, later in the book, a third, Into the Water features more than a dozen storytellers, leaving readers hard-pressed to keep them all straight without a set of flash cards. None of the voices is exactly eager to divulge everything they know, leaving readers to piece together the overarching truth from each chapter. But the deeper readers proceed, the easier it is to be swept away by the assorted voices and the secrets they conceal. Hawkins skillfully delves into the psyche of each character, extracting their feelings, fears and fallacies, slowly ramping up the psychological suspense as she goes.

That said, it’s difficult to discern whose story this actually is. One could argue that the lead character is Jules Abbott, sister of Nel Abbott, who dies at the outset of the book. But you could also argue that Nel’s daughter, Lena, is the novel’s main protagonist. Hawkins keeps you guessing, and in doing so loses some of the emotional impact of creating a single character to root for and sympathize with.

Into the Water is ultimately a story of families mired in secrets and uneasy relationships, haunted by the past and fearful of facing the truth in the present. The book builds slowly, requiring patience above all from readers but with the promise of a more compelling latter half of the book.

Paula Hawkins follows up The Girl on the Train with a twisty and compulsive thriller, Into the Water.

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Dennis Lehane has a gift for discerning beautiful ruins amid the shattered lives of his characters. He has bewitched us with this cutting spell in novel after novel, from Gone, Baby, Gone to Shutter Island. With Since We Fell, he’s done it again, weaving a piercing thriller out of secrets, paranoia and what life can become when darkness is the only thing that stirs you anymore.

Rachel Childs grew up surrounded by the secrets of her mother, and so she grew obsessed with the truth. When that pursuit of truth led to a successful journalism career, an on-air panic attack tanked it, rendering her a virtual shut-in until she found a husband who could stabilize her life with love and seemingly supernatural understanding. Just as Rachel is beginning to find her footing again, a chance sighting on a Boston street shatters everything she thought she knew about her life, sending her into a web of secrets that even her powerful journalistic mind couldn’t prepare her for.

The right storyteller can forge trust with readers, a bond that allows the tale to go anywhere. Lehane wields that talent masterfully. His confident, precise prose makes you lean in until you want nothing more than to know his heroine completely, only to be surprised as the thriller trap snaps shut.

With Since We Fell, Lehane further cements his reputation as one of our finest crime writers, forging an unforgettable character and then driving her deep into page-turning thriller territory with the deft hand of an old master. This novel will please longtime Lehane fans and new readers alike, leaving them wanting more of his beautiful darkness.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Dennis Lehane has a gift for discerning beautiful ruins amid the shattered lives of his characters. He has bewitched us with this cutting spell in novel after novel, from Gone, Baby, Gone to Shutter Island. With Since We Fell, he’s done it again, weaving a…
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“I didn’t do the crime.” Journalist Rebekah Roberts reads these words, part of prisoner DeShawn Perkins’ handwritten plea for justice. He’s doing time for a murder that took place 22 years earlier, when Malcolm and Sabrina Davis, along with their young foster daughter, were brutally shot in their Crown Heights apartment. DeShawn, their troubled foster son, is fingered for the crime. But after reading DeShawn’s letter, Rebekah is moved to follow up on his contention of innocence.

Conviction is the latest mystery from Julia Dahl (Invisible CityRun You Down). Police officer Saul Katz, a prominent character in Dahl's earlier books, is a kind of stepfather to Rebekah. The story slips back and forth in time between 2014, the year Rebekah reads DeShawn's letter, to 1992. We learn that 1992 was the year of the murder, and that Katz was involved in the DeShawn case as a rookie with the NYPD during this time when violence between black and Jewish neighborhoods was rampant in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

The elements of this chilling, well-crafted jigsaw puzzle never skip over the hard facts of racial division and frequent bloodshed that racked the Brooklyn community during the '90s. Each character receives close attention: from Isaiah, an uncompromising Jewish landlord; to Henrietta, whose testimony solidified the case; to Joseph's unspoken, terrible mission; and finally to DeShawn and his tragic story. Most of all, Conviction captures the characters of Saul and Rebekah in their intricate, sometimes explosive interactions that explore both affection and wariness.

One particular passage captures Dahl’s essential mindset as she frames this story. In Saul's early cop years, while closely involved with the Crown Heights neighborhood, he recognizes “how much the camaraderie among officers resembled the camaraderie among the men in shul. . . . The men in blue uniforms—like the men in black hats—had a common language, a common purpose, a common set of rules and prejudices. They were misunderstood by outsiders, but outsiders were not important. What was important was the man beside you.”

Rebekah shines in this installment in Dahl's series, and the young journalist is sure to linger in readers’ minds. She’s solid, believable and never overplayed. In Conviction, Rebekah recognizes the insular nature of parties in conflict and finds a way to bring the truth to light.

“I didn’t do the crime.” Journalist Rebekah Roberts reads these words, part of prisoner DeShawn Perkins’ handwritten plea for justice. He’s doing time for a murder that took place 22 years earlier, when Malcolm and Sabrina Davis, along with their young foster daughter, were brutally shot in their Crown Heights apartment. DeShawn, their troubled foster son, is fingered for the crime. But after reading DeShawn’s letter, Rebekah is moved to follow up on his contention of innocence.

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Elanor Dymott’s debut, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, was a sophisticated thriller about a man whose wife is murdered when visiting an old advisor at Oxford. In Silver and Salt, Dymott applies her elegant sense of the mysterious to the story of an ill-fated family as two daughters of a famous photographer try to come to terms with his death.

After the 2003 death of renowned British photographer Max Hollingbourne, his daughters convene at a villa in Greece, where they spent many summers as a family. Vinny is the older, more responsible sister, a translator of German drama and poetry and happily married. Three years younger and considerably more volatile, the mordantly unhappy and antisocial Ruthie arrives after the funeral with a list of grievances and demands. Already haunted by memories of an unhappy childhood, a glimpse of the little girl in the neighboring house further destabilizes Ruthie.

The novel interweaves past and present, much of it sad. Max first met his French wife, Sophie, at a photo shoot, and not long after, she gave up her career as an opera singer to be his wife and raise their daughters as he roamed the world, often leaving them alone for months. Even after Sophie began to show signs of mental illness, Max never stopped traveling, but called in his sister Beatrice to help, even asking her to live with the girls when Sophie became too ill to take care of them. When Ruthie tried to share her burgeoning interest in photography with Max, his reaction was often cruel and sometimes violent, leading to an estrangement between father and younger daughter that lasted until his death. Dymott uses a photographer’s ability to alter and manipulate images through the developing process as a metaphor for the tenuous grip Ruthie has on sanity, although there are times when the author’s poetic reach exceeds the novel’s action.

Silver and Salt is an achingly intimate look at grief, and Dymott’s descriptive gifts are amply found in her rich depictions of place from an English flower-filled meadow to the Greek olive groves surrounding the Hollingbourne villa.

Elanor Dymott’s debut, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, was a sophisticated thriller about a man whose wife is murdered when visiting an old advisor at Oxford. In Silver and Salt, Dymott applies her elegant sense of the mysterious to the story of an ill-fated family as two daughters of a famous photographer try to come to terms with his death.

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Those who pick up Jennifer Finney Boylan’s new novel, Long Black Veil, may be expecting a traditional horror story. The premise seems familiar at first glance, using well-loved tropes: A group of college students looking for fun accidentally get locked in the abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary, only to discover they aren’t alone. But Boylan, rather than focusing the story on who gets out alive that night in 1980, instead subverts the genre and focuses on identity, relationships and the human experience.

Alternating between 1980 and present day, Long Black Veil follows the six friends as the repercussions of that night send reverberations through the rest of their lives. In the present day, a body has been discovered in the walls of the prison, and Jon Casey, a famous chef who is haunted by the events of that night, has been arrested for the murder. The one man who could vouch for him has died, but an old friend, main character Judith Carrigan, has information that may be able to save him—though sharing it could mean losing her family and the life she has fought for.

Those familiar with Boylan’s bestselling memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders will be unsurprised by the dark humor and beautiful prose that drive the narrative. Boylan has crafted a plot full of whodunits, faked deaths and new identities, and delivered an elegant tale that does justice to both the high emotions of youth and the hardened regrets of middle age. Her pacing keeps the reader racing through time periods, life events and characters, eagerly flipping to the next chapter in an attempt to unravel the countless riddles the story offers. Fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History will find an equally engaging and erudite story full of references to classic literature and history.

Those who pick up Jennifer Finney Boylan’s new novel, Long Black Veil, may be expecting a traditional horror story. The premise seems familiar at first glance, using well-loved tropes: A group of college students looking for fun accidentally get locked in the abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary, only to discover they aren’t alone. But Boylan, rather than focusing the story on who gets out alive that night in 1980, instead subverts the genre and focuses on identity, relationships and the human experience.

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