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Summary
Summary
Scandal, love, family, and murder combine in this gripping literary mystery by critically acclaimed author Emily Arsenault, in which a young academic's life is turned upside down when her brother is arrested for murder and she must prove his innocence.
The Battle siblings are used to disappointment. Seven years, one marriage and divorce, three cats, and a dog later, Theresa still hasn't finished her dissertation. Instead of a degree, she's got a houseful of adoring pets and a dead-end copywriting job for a local candle company.
Jeff, her so-called genius older brother, doesn't have it together, either. Creative, and loyal, he's also aimless in work and love. But his new girlfriend, Kim, a pretty waitress in her twenties, appears smitten.
When Theresa agrees to dog-sit Kim's puggle for a weekend, she has no idea that it is the beginning of a terrifying nightmare that will shatter her quiet world. Soon, Kim's body will be found in the woods, and Jeff will become the prime suspect.
Though the evidence is overwhelming, Theresa knows that her brother is not a cold-blooded murderer. But to clear him she must find out more about Kim. Investigating the dead woman's past, Theresa uncovers a treacherous secret involving politics, murder, and scandal--and becomes entangled in a potentially dangerous romance. But the deeper she falls into this troubling case, the more it becomes clear that, in trying to save her brother's life, she may be sacrificing her own.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of this captivating mystery from Arsenault (Miss Me When I'm Gone), Theresa Battle-who has a houseful of pets in Thompsonville, Mass., and a dissertation she might never complete-agrees to dog-sit for her brother Jeff's new girlfriend, waitress Kim Graber. Then Kim's body is discovered, the police arrest Jeff for the murder, and Theresa sets out to prove his innocence. Kim was obsessed with discrediting a local politician with whom she shared an unpleasant history, but Theresa learns the investigation has unearthed other people's dark secrets, too. Arsenault deftly blends pet humor and laugh-out-loud moments with the unfolding portrait of complex, multilayered Kim. Only Theresa's romantic entanglements with an English department colleague and one of Kim's coworkers, who both have information that could help Jeff, ring a false note. Still, Theresa's self-deprecating honesty and anecdotes about her dissertation subject, medieval mystic Margery Kempe, are as engaging as her loyalty to her brother and willingness to face unsavory truths about him and herself. Agent: Laura Langlie, Laura Langlie Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Theresa Battle blames her perpetually bad fortune when her brother's girlfriend, Kim, disappears while Theresa is pet-sitting her puggle. Secretly, however, Theresa welcomes any distraction from her ho-hum job as candle factory copywriter and from pondering the unfinished dissertation she's been dragging around for years. Then police find Kim's body and quickly arrest Theresa's brother, Jeff, for murder. All Jeff can tell Theresa is that Kim has been obsessed with making a film designed to prove a local prosecutor earned his stellar record by manipulating confused kids to testify favorably for the prosecution. The film, Kim hoped, would ruin the prosecutor and make her YouTube famous. Summoning hidden talents in subterfuge, Theresa tracks down everyone linked to Kim's film, unearthing disturbing questions about the justice system and confronting some harsh realities about her own life's inertia. Arsenault (Miss Me When I'm Gone, 2012) strikes a fine balance between heavy themes, dangerous romances, quirky characters, and wry humor. A literary cousin to Lisa Lutz's Spellman Files series and Lutz's stand-alone, written with David Hayward, Heads You Lose (2011).--Tran, Christine Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A TORNADO TORE through the town of Jericho, Miss., in the most recent of Ace Atkins's deeply rooted regional novels set in a gritty pocket of the rural South. In THE FORSAKEN (Putnam, $26.95), a resident who survived that last book reflects on "the ugliness of what we've done to this place, all the logging, busted-up trailers, and stripping of anything that can make a buck" and decides that "we didn't need a tornado to rip this town apart, we just needed a few more good years." Quinn Colson, the county sheriff in this true-to-life series, serves as the moral counterweight to the corrupt politicians, unethical lawmen and well-connected criminals who constitute the local power structure. Quinn gets mixed signals from this quarter when he reopens a decades-old case on the word of a survivor who now claims her attacker is still at large, and that the black vagrant the townsfolk lynched for raping her and murdering her friend was an innocent victim of vigilante rage. That's a workable narrative thread, but it gets tangled in all the other shady dealings going on in this book. Johnny Stagg, who runs a thriving drug and prostitution racket from a truck stop off Highway 45, is expanding his operation by going into partnership with a Memphis crime boss. The notorious Chains LeDoux (hairy, heavily tattooed and "animalwild," according to one old boy) is getting out of the federal penitentiary after 20 years, which brings his biker gang, the Born Losers, roaring back to Jericho. And with all the reconstruction projects underway (cross your fingers, the town might be getting a Walmart), someone has to keep track of the kickbacks. A more focused plot would have been nice, but Atkins doesn't construct a cohesive narrative so much as chase down articulate characters who can contribute to his densely layered stack of stories. Johnny Stagg has a wonderfully filthy mouth, but Atkins finds his natural-born storytellers everywhere, from Mr. Jim's barbershop to a pancake breakfast at the V.F.W. Even a brute like Chester ("Call me Animal"), who rides with the Born Losers, has a certain way with the few words in his limited vocabulary. It's all music to these ears. SHARON McCONE, the private investigator in Marcia Muller's detective stories, solved her first case in 1977, so Muller is entitled to go crazy on an assignment that takes this sturdy series to the 30-book mark. She does something more daring by giving the NIGHT SEARCHERS (Grand Central, $26) the clean, classic moves of her earliest novels. It's refreshing to watch her revered sleuth personally handle the low-tech job of following a rich young couple around town. McCone is investigating the wife's sightings of a cult of devil-worshipers supposedly offering human sacrifices in the nicer sections of San Francisco. McCone was never a loner. She started out working for a co-op of legal aid lawyers, and she maintains a full staff of operatives at her own shop. But this time, she's not as involved with her husband's hush-hush overseas business, and her demanding extended family seems to be managing its domestic problems without her. McCone uses that freedom to infiltrate a vaguely sinister group of treasure hunters who prowl the city by night, searching for clues in places like Alamo Square and Aquatic Park and the Maritime Museum down by the bay. It's the perfect narrative structure for Muller, who is never better than when she's roaming the streets of the city she knows and loves so well. EMILY ARSENAULT'S mysteries are so much fun you hardly notice they're essentially academic novels. Theresa Battle, the neurotic narrator of WHAT STRANGE CREATURES (Morrow, paper, $14.99), has been a Ph.D. candidate for so long that the new department chairwoman issues a deadline for her dissertation on Margery Kempe. Theresa is the first to admit that this medieval mystic "was absolutely an eccentric and almost certainly a nut job," but the bond between scholar and subject is one of the joys of this quirky book. Another is Theresa's affectionate relationship with her sweet but peculiar brother, Jeff, who talks her into boarding his girlfriend Kim's dog while she's out of town. Things get more complicated (and less believable) when Kim goes missing and Jeff is charged with her murder. But the salient point is that Kim's dog gets along beautifully with Theresa's three cats and her dog, Boober (named after the theologian Martin Buber), and that Theresa finds a boyfriend who shares her fascination with Margery Kempe. FRANCES FYFIELD is a criminal lawyer who writes stylish, if staid, legal mysteries. But when she wants to go over to the dark side, she produces imaginative psychological suspense novels like GOLD DIGGER (Witness/HarperCollins, paper, $13.99). The scene is a mansion by the sea where the elderly Thomas Porteous lies dying in the arms of his much younger wife, Diana. Through the magic of flashback, we learn that Thomas met his bride when she broke into his house, and we can observe the subtle ways Fyfield develops the characters of this endearing couple. But once Thomas is dead and gone, Fyfield turns like a snake on his daughters - let's call them Goneril and Regan - who try to cheat Diana out of her inheritance. Not in this fairy tale, you witches.