2.5

Excellent contemporary mystery, and lots of bonus points for starring a librarian! Herchenroether explores the lives of the murdered without dwelling on or glorifying the murder or killer. I could hardly put it down and I hope this is the start of a genealogist-librarian crime solving series.

I also appreciated Herchenroether’s balance of technology, paper research, and logic to solve crimes.

I read a galley and so this may change before publication, but there were some distracting changes of tense in the ghost’s sections. I can understand why a ghost might struggle with temporality, but this human reader was a tad confused

There were things I loved about this book and things that I didn't really like, but chose to overlook because I was enjoying the story. First of all, this book absolutely grabbed me from the beginning.

Not a spoiler to say that one of the main characters has breast cancer and is going through various procedures--the author is a breast cancer survivor--and the detail and description of Laura's experience was so realistic and heart-breaking. It made me have a visceral reaction to something happening to a character, which is not something I've ever experienced reading a book.

The case itself had a very similar set up to the case on the Bear Brook podcast (which the author credits in her acknowledgements) except this story was set in New Mexico near the Gila National Forest. Having spent a little time in NM, I can see how much care and detail the author put into fleshing out these spaces as well.

The two main character POVs I really liked and I understand why the third POV was the victim herself and what the author was trying to achieve with that, and I've seen others dismiss it as not liking the ghost POV without really connecting to the intent behind it. That being said, I would agree that it was not a favorite part of the book for me.

Thirdly, I wish the second half of the book had happened more slowly. It really ramps up into the case and I felt like some really emotional punches were almost glanced over. I wish we could have spent more time with the characters in those moments, rather than continuing on with the case work.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed the story and the descriptions really got to me, so just for that unique experience, I have to rate this one highly. (As a person who hardly ever gives 5 stars.)

I felt that the third narrative of the dead woman was a bit disjointed and that sort of threw the storyline off for me as well as feeling imbalanced with the personal details of the narrators with respect to their own battles - heavy in the beginning, then sort of sprinkled throughout the rest.

In this literary mystery, a young librarian and amateur genealogist, Laura, turns to sleuthing to cope with her brutal breast cancer treatment. When she makes progress on a cold case — the murder of a mother and two children whose bodies were found 30 years before in the New Mexico national forest — her path merges with Jean’s, the nearly-retired police officer in charge of the case, who is wrestling with her own existential crisis. Ghosts also have a voice in this story, a twist both whimsical and dark. This is a satisfying whodunnit and a haunting novel.

Thanks to Tin House for the advance reader copy!

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