Ten Days Gone

Ten Days Gone by Beverly Long
MIRA Books: 2/18/20
eBook review copy; 384 pages
ISBN-13: 9780778309581 

Ten Days Gone by Beverly Long is a highly recommended police procedural and the beginning of the A.L. McKittridge series.

In Baywood, Wisconsin, small town police detectives A.L. McKittridge and Rena Morgan are on the trail of a serial killer. Four women have been found dead in forty days, exactly 10 days apart. There seems to be nothing connecting the women to each other and the careful killer is not leaving any clues. A.L. and Rena need to find out what connects the victims to each other and the significance of the ten days apart. Hopefully they can discern who the next victim will be and stop the killer before there is another murder. Finding who the next victim will be may be just the beginning of their struggles.

Long writes in an well-done easy-to-follow style. As the case unfolds, the clues are logically uncovered and followed. The narrative is told through alternating points-of-view and it ensures A.L. and Rena are viewed as distinct individuals as the story delves into their personal lives. The background provided in the narrative makes it easy to learn about the personal lives of A.L. and Rena while we follow their professional collaboration. Like most characters in a procedural, they have personal stuff going on while they are trying to stop a killer.

Ten Days Gone is a nice solid start to a new series and would be a nice choice when you want to simply read for relaxation and follow along as the clues as they come. There are no wildly twisty surprises or red herrings in this solid procedural. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of MIRA Books.

The Adventurer's Son

The Adventurer's Son by Roman Dial
HarperCollins: 2/18/20
eBook review copy; 368 pages
ISBN-13: 9780062876607

The Adventurer's Son by Roman Dial is a highly recommended memoir about the author's adventures and his son.

Roman Dial (Mathematics and Biology professor at Alaska Pacific University and National Geographic Explorer) embraced real life outdoor adventures, exploration, and risk taking as a young man and went on to impart his love for exploration, and endurance to his son, Cody Roman. Dial recounts his own adventures and goes on to describe the trips on which he later took Cody, who also went by Roman. Occasionally his wife, Peggy, and daughter Jazz accompanied them, but Cody Roman became his father's ongoing partner on adventures.

Later, when Cody Roman was 27, he went on a solo trek, hiking and exploring in Central America. On July 10, 2014 he walked alone into Corcovado National Park, an untracked rainforest along Costa Rica’s remote Pacific Coast, and disappeared. Once his father and mother realized he was missing, Dial went down to Costa Rica and began the search for his son. It took two years to find out what happened and the search for closure was plagued with government bureaucrats obstructing the search, false information, and rumors.
 
Losing a child is one of most difficult experiences a parent can have, so losing your son and not knowing what happened to him makes a heart-breaking experience even worse. Certainly Dial blames himself for encouraging his son to embrace going on adventures and exploring dangerous areas.  Having a reality-TV show spinning a murder theory about Cody Roman while they were still searching for what happened to their son took a toll. In the end they find the closure and some sense of the truth behind what happened.
 
Dial's love for exploration is evident in his writing, as his love for his wife and family. The one drawback of this tribute to Cody Roman is that it begins by telling Roman's own story rather than starting with Cody Roman's solo trek and disappearance. If this were a biography, this would make perfect sense to follow a chronological timeline. As a tribute to Cody Roman, however, it would have been stronger to start with the disappearance and then back-fill with the history of adventures and exploring that made Cody Roman confident in setting off by himself. 
 
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.

The Lucky One

The Lucky One by Lori Rader-Day
HarperCollins: 2/18/20
eBook review copy; 400 pages
ISBN-13: 9780062938077

The Lucky One by Lori Rader-Day is a very highly recommended novel of suspense.

Alice Fine volunteers her spare time on The Doe Pages, a website that matches missing people with unidentified remains. Her preoccupation with helping search for clues to help reunite people with their missing loved ones is a result of her own experiences. When she was three-years-old Alice was kidnapped from her backyard, and, against all odds, found by her policeman father within twenty-four hours. Alice knows how lucky she was to survive this experience without any harm, unlike so many others. When she sees the picture of a missing person on the Doe site and realizes it is a picture of her kidnapper, she begins looking for him, with help from two other Doe Pages participants. Finding him could protect others and give Alice some closure.

Merrily Cruz is another woman searching for answers about the same man. She considers him, Uncle Rick, a stepfather. Although he didn't visit her, he has been a father figure to Merrily and sporadically texts her. In their search Alice and her Doe friends come across Merrily, and the women all undertake their search for this man, whose surname changes, while trying to uncover what are lies and what is the truth.

The characters are all wonderfully flawed and believable characters that you will feel empathy for immediately. It is understood that they are all unreliable narrators. They don't know the true backstory of the man they are all looking for. We are following along in their search as they look into the past, uncovering information and clues. While following new leads they are piecing together what they learn with what they think they know. 

The writing is outstanding in this well-paced novel. I was entrenched in the story and totally engrossed in the twisty plot from start to finish. The investigation the women undertake unfolds naturally as new information and clues are uncovered. Alice has other clues she is looking at related to her present life while looking into her kidnapping as a child, which adds an additional depth to the narrative. All the threads in the plot are wrapped up, although not in any way you would expect. This is an excellent novel of suspense. The final twisty denouement is what rocketed The Lucky One to my highest rating.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.

Ghosts of the Missing

Ghosts of the Missing by Kathleen Donohoe
HMH Books: 2/11/20
eBook review copy; 320 pages
ISBN-13: 9780544557178 

Ghosts of the Missing by Kathleen Donohoe is a so-so tale of loss, memory, and traditions.

Adair McCrohan has long been haunted by the unsolved mystery of the disappearance at age twelve of her best friend girl, Rowan Kinnane, on October 28, 1995, in Culleton, New York. She returns to her family home, the Moye House, an old mansion that is currently a writer's retreat to stay with her poet uncle, Michan McCrohan. A writer currently living there, Ciaran Riordan, has a personal connection to Rowan and hopes to solve what happened to his sister. Adair joins forces with Ciaran to try and discover what happened to Rowan. In the process of investigating they uncover some hidden secrets and ghosts of the past.

In this very slow moving novel the chapters alternate between Adair in the present and in 1995, as well as various other people who have lived in Cullenton since the 1800s. Mixed into the melancholy, atmospheric tale is Irish folklore, legends, conspiracies, mysticism, rumors, murder, and science. While the plot is supposedly focused on solving what happened to Rowan, it really isn't at all. This may be as problematic for many other readers as it was for me. There is no closure in solving a mystery. This is more of a character driven family saga that jumps around in time between decades and characters.

The quality of the actual writing is quite alluring. It is beautifully rendered and poetic. The problem is twofold. The jumping around between time periods and characters detracts from the novel rather than creating interest and becomes distracting. The second is the premise that a mystery is to be solved. It isn't a true focus of the plot at all. This really wasn't a good choice for me, but may be a better fit for others.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HMH Books.

Eden Mine

Eden Mine by S. M. Hulse
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2/11/20
eBook review copy; 272 pages
ISBN-13: 9780374146474

Eden Mine by S. M. Hulse is a very highly recommended novel that examines the aftershocks of an act of domestic terrorism in a small Montana town. This eloquently written, artistic novel is one of the best novels I've read so far this year.

It is a Sunday morning and Josephine (Jo) Faber is packing up the home that she and her brother Samuel inherited near Eden Mine in Montana. Their home has been seized by the state through eminent domain. While packing she learns about the bombing of the district courthouse at Elk Fork on the radio, but it is not until friend and unofficial guardian Sheriff Hawkins shows up at her front door that she realizes something is wrong. Hawkins wants to know where her brother, Samuel, is. As far as she knows, he left that morning to go find work.

When Jo is told that Samuel was caught on a security camera near the court house, she knows he is likely responsible. The tragedy is that a church was meeting in a nearby store front and the bomb blast blew out the window. Now a nine-year-old girl, the daughter of the pastor, is in critical condition. Jo knows that Samuel would never have meant for anyone to be placed in harm's way because of their family history. He has been taking care of Jo since he was 17 and she was 10.

Eden Mine is a finely crafted, nuanced, and beautifully written heart-breaking novel about family bonds, loyalty, love, individual freedom, injustice, the testing of faith, and redemption. It also touches on the anger, injustice, and disaffection tearing apart many communities. The novel is told mainly through Jo's point-of-view, with short chapters from Asa Truth, the pastor whose daughter is hospitalized, and Samuel, who is in hiding and writing to Jo on a map he has with him. The complete backstory slowly unfolds over the course of the novel, making what happened more nuanced and complicated that it would appear to be at first.

All of the characters are well-developed, complicated individuals. Hulse captures these damaged people and their thoughts, feelings, and struggles with an acumen and sensitivity that makes the story richer. The inner thoughts of the characters will resonate with readers. Some of the questions that Eden Mine raises are those that are struggled with almost universally. A case could be made that the novel is allegorical and reflects human struggles Biblically. In the end this is an eloquently written, touching novel that will stay with me for years.
 

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Last Day

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray
Penguin Random House: 2/4/20
eBook review copy; 384 pages
ISBN-13: 9781524745813

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray is a recommended dystopian thriller set in 2059.

The earth has stopped rotating, leaving half the world in perpetual light and the other in darkness. Great Britain is lucky enough to be in a narrow habitable region and is now a totalitarian nation with closed borders. A small section of land has been given to the United States for colonization.  Ellen Hopper is a scientist living on a rig in the Atlantic, studying ocean currents. When two government officials come to the rig via helicopter she is basically forced to go back to London to visit the bedside of her dying former Oxford mentor, Edward Thorne. He has a secret he has been keeping and government officials are sure he will tell her where to find the information they seek.

Ellen knows a secret about Thorne's past, which she keeps to herself, but she doesn't know the secret information the government seeks. They hope Thorne will tell her. What happens is that she secretly sends herself on the mission to try and figure out the truth, his secret, on her own, following clues and leads as she uncovers them. She is being watched and followed, beaten up and interrogated, yet still managing to stay one step ahead of the officials who want to destroy the information Thorne has hidden away.

The writing is good and the short chapters keep the plot moving along swiftly in this very changed world. The characters are compelling and interesting. The dystopian world will interest science fiction fans, but the plot requires setting disbelief aside in order to enjoy the mystery of Ellen's search. Her search makes this more of an espionage thriller, where the setting makes the search more interesting, but you have to believe she could find what others could not find. The ending leaves room open for a sequel.

One niggling concern in involving the reader's investment in the plot is that the science behind the slow down and stop wasn't presented until a bit later in the story when it should have been explained earlier. I found myself wanting the explanation behind it long before it was given. The second is the search by Ellen herself, which requires you to believe that the nefarious government officials wouldn't have thought of what she does and couldn't find out the information without her help.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House.

Thunder Bay

Thunder Bay by Douglas Skelton
Simon & Schuster: 2/11/20
eBook review copy; 312 pages
ISBN-13: 9781950691340

Thunder Bay by Douglas Skelton is a very highly recommended atmospheric mystery/thriller.

Scottish reporter Rebecca Connolly learns that suspected murderer Roddie Drummond will be returning to the Hebridean island of Stoirm to attend his mother's funeral. Fifteen years earlier his girlfriend Mhairi was murdered, and, even though he was not convicted, Roddie is guilty in the eyes of many islanders. He left the island immediately after the trial and hasn't been back since. His return will certainly stir up resentments and trouble. Rebecca has other, personal, reasons for wanting to visit the island so she goes ahead and travels there in defiance of her editor. She is looking into both the story of Mhairi's murder and her own family history.

Thunder Bay is a beautifully written mystery/thriller. Skelton introduces the large cast of characters via their interactions in the local social structure as Rebecca begins her investigation. All the characters are complex and well-developed, and the island, "it's an island thing," is as much a character as the people in this atmospheric mystery.  Secrets abound on the island. Rebecca's interactions and the answers she receives to the questions she is asking perfectly captures the social culture and setting.

As the plot advances, the information Rebecca is uncovering begins to create a tension. This tension increases and builds incrementally until it is palpable. The hostility and unease she experiences is from both her investigation of the murder, as well as questions about her family's history on the island. As in any closed, tightly knit community, there are secrets and resentments that people have kept hidden. Skelton uses flashbacks to enhance the plot and tell some of the backstory. I enjoyed this novel immensely, but have to admit that I was disappointed with the reveal of the secret that made Rebecca's father leave the island forever.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Simon & Schuster.