Library Limelights 275

 

Alafair Burke. Find Me. Ebook download from TPL. USA: HarperCollins Books, 2022.

Be prepared to meet a lot of characters as two or three stories are going to enmesh. Hope Miller is a focal point, a woman injured fifteen years ago in a car crash, sustaining amnesia since then. She’d been “adopted” by Lindsay Kelly, the person who rescued her, and they’ve become the best of friends in Lindsay’s small town where everyone knows Hope and her missing background. But Hope’s move to independence in a Long Island community results in her disappearance. Ellie Hatcher is a New York police detective, originally from Wichita, Kansas. The DNA of a murdered man floating in Long Island Sound, Alex Lopez, matches someone in an old Kansas serial killer case; that old case was worked by Ellie’s policeman father Jerry and ended with the conviction of William Summers. Now, Long Island police think Hope killed Lopez—if only they could find her.

It’s very complicated.

Lawyer Lindsay and detective Ellie ultimately work together to reconstruct a painstaking history of impulse and coincidence that connect the Lopez murder back to the killing of a Kansas businessman, the death of Ellie’s policeman father, and Hope’s disappearance. So many tangled threads and tiny clues need to be accounted for even as the overall picture keeps changing. Encounters include sly real estate salesman Evan; dismissive cop Carter Decker; Ellie’s father’s former partner Steve; Kansas senatorial candidate Melanie Locke; plus various family supporters, detractors, witnesses, and boyfriends. Author Burke manages to integrate topics such as child abuse, police corruption, and gay love. Burke is at her devious best here, but I still had a few unanswered questions at the end.

Hope

▪ When she first arrived, everyone was curious about her. She was a walking, talking, living, breathing, real-life mystery. (17)

▪ There was only one explanation: like Alex Lopez, Hope had grown up in Wichita. (228)

▪ “Ellie told me the amnesia part. That’s one hell of a long con.” (304)

Lindsay

▪ “Basically they want me to believe that some random person who cut themselves in that house in East Hampton also randomly left some blood in a house in Kansas twenty-three years ago.” (82)

▪ “But the odds that it’s a random coincidence that has nothing to do with either Hope’s disappearance or your father’s case?” (93)

▪ If he could fall in love with someone else while he had a wife and baby, who was to say he wouldn’t do the same to her? (120)

▪ Lindsay loved Hope more than she’d ever love anyone else. (188)

Ellie

▪ When she thought about her dad, it was almost always about either his death or the deaths that obsessed him while he was still alive. (31)

▪ Jess had always been more willing to accept that their dad did the selfish thing and took his own life. (111)

▪ “But first you were helping the defense lawyer with the missing amnesia friend. And now you’re helping the cop who obviously thinks the missing friend went and killed someone.” (170)

▪ “It turns out you’re not the first detective to have asked about this necklace.” (211)

▪ “Someone obviously doesn’t want the truth about Mullaney’s murder to come out.” (288)

Lisa Lutz. The Accomplice. USA: Ballantine Books/Random House, 2022.

Luna and Owen have been intense best friends since school days. Never sexual, and in some ways the opposite of one another, the relationship filled each’s need for self-confidence and trust. Extrovert Owen married Irene, an heiress when her mother died—to the resentment of her artist stepfather Leo. Introvert Luna married Sam, a surgeon. The spouses seem to accept that the Luna-Owen loyalty supercedes their marriages. Luna closely guards the guilty secret that as a youngster she lied under oath for her brother John during a murder investigation, whereby John was free to kill another woman; that time he was caught and convicted, exposing Luna’s original lie. Despite an identity change, she occasionally gets hate mail. In college, Owen comes under suspicion when Scarlet dies in a fall—a would-be girlfriend who pursued and harassed him. Although her death was ruled an accident, the stigma shadowed him for years.

In the present day, Owen’s wife Irene is found shot to death; the spouse is always the first suspect, right? His old nightmare is repeating. Scenes shift between college days and the present, pointing out similarities and differences in circumstances. Back then, Luna and Owen’s older brother Griff were clearly falling in love but an unknown intervention ended it. At the wake for Irene, Luna decides to leave Sam. She knew Owen indulged in extramarital affairs but didn’t know Sam had been sleeping with Irene, her friend. The police consider potential motives, just as a new shooting occurs. Lutz explores the intimate nature of friendships that withhold secrets, when loyalties can be betrayed by a lie.

Bits

▪ Most people were cautious and slow to warm around Luna. Owen just barreled forward, unafraid. (15)

▪ “I don’t think I can go through this again,” Owen said. (45)

▪ Leo covered his face and began to sob. Luna was surprised he could cry so freely. (91)

▪ “I need to know exactly what to say to end the relationship without any drama.” (139)

▪ “Good people don’t get hate mail. Think about it,” Scarlet said.

▪ “Owen said in our interview that Irene didn’t want to be cremated and then he cremated her.” (178)

▪ “How long have you been interviewing my client?” Griff said. (251)

▪ “Being both married and lonely is an uncomfortable combination,” said Sam. (259)

▪ Luna believed that part of her penance was never letting her guilt subside. (269)

▪ “Half the student body thinks I’m a murderer. I’m not going back,” Owen said. (375)

▪ “Irene told me things about Leo that night.” (393)

Christopher Fowler. The Water Room. USA: Bantam/Random House, Inc., 2005.

Failure here on my part, book abandoned half way through. It requires the right attention which was sadly escaping me. No fault of the author who created elderly detectives past their expiry dates: Arthur Bryant and John May. The two play well against each other as they settle their Peculiar Crimes Unit into new offices under the tolerance of the Met police. I gather the destruction of their former offices was unintentionally caused by the eccentric Bryant. Who is full of arcane wisdom and iconoclastic values. Who goes off on tangents to disperse said wisdom, whether it’s London’s underground rivers or ancient Egyptian rituals. Being assigned only odd cases definitely suits their advanced years and history of a close but sparring relationship. May manages to keep Bryant out of trouble, most times.

As a favour to a friend—which would be nixed by their supervisor, should he know―they puzzle over a woman who appeared to die by drowning, sitting in a bone-dry room. Since that death, a nice young woman buys the jinxed house. And another favour from the detectives: following a friend’s husband who is mysteriously visiting locked entrances to buried rivers. Trouble is surely coming. I did not feel compelled to put up with irrepressible Arthur’s many educational tangents, having already suspected where things were going. A well-written literate work (it’s one in a series about these two), the humour is fun and the characters are great. Re-visiting Fowler with more patience is in the future.

I did manage to pull some quotes from very quotable text:

▪ Bryant was no longer allowed to touch the computers owing to the odd demagnetizing effect he had on delicate technology. (9)

▪ Bryant did the heavy thinking, May did the heavy lifting. (24)

▪ “We’ve no motive, no cause of death, no leads, no prints, nothing.” (54)

▪ “A nation of shopkeepers.” Bryant dragged a letter off his desk with a derisive snort. “Greedy little proprietors.” (55)

▪ “We finally get an office door and he tries to knock it off its hinges,” sighed Bryant, packing his pipe with a handful of dried leaves. “From now on, we’re going to have to hide our tracks more carefully.” (189)

▪ “He’s got the charm of a rectal probe, and no social skills to speak of, so nobody wants to go for a drink with him.” (188)

▪ “I know about these things. The movement of water far exceeds anything you can imagine.” (199)

▪ “He’s registered as a sex offender, Arthur! You took him for a stroll with a child on police duty—are you out of your mind?” (212)

Typical exchange

“The Balaklava Street residents clearly have trouble talking to me.”

“Arthur, everyone has trouble talking to you. You scare them.”

“Rubbish. I’m much more charming these days. I hardly ever get annoyed with the officers Stanley assigns to us, even slack-jawed drooling neanderthals like Bimsley.” (163)