My Review:A smart, haunting tale of psychological suspense from the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of Turn of Mind.
Jane loses everything when her teenage daughter is killed in a senseless accident. Jane is devastated, but sometime later, she makes one tiny stab at a new life: she moves from San Francisco to the tiny seaside town of Half Moon Bay. She is inconsolable, and yet, as the months go by, she is able to cobble together some version of a job, of friends, of the possibility of peace.
And then, children begin to disappear. And soon, Jane sees her own pain reflected in all the parents in the town. She wonders if she will be able to live through the aching loss, the fear all around her. But as the disappearances continue, she begins to see that what her neighbors are wondering is if it is Jane herself who has unleashed the horror of loss.
Half Moon Bay is a chilling story about a mother haunted by her past. As Stewart O’Nan said about Turn of Mind—this novel “blindfolds the reader and spins her around.”
Meh. This was a ton of build-up and mystery with an unreliable narrator and then it ended so abruptly that it didn't even make sense. Jane was hard to like, not because she retreated after tragedy but because her motivation was lacking and I didn't understand any of the choices she made. Really, this book didn't make a lot of sense. The setting was fine but some of the most important parts and details were given the short shrift in trying to make Jane unreliable such that the ultimate drive of the book evaporated. You may have better luck with this one than me.
Naturally the teenagers who found Heidi documented the scene with their cell phones; that's what this generation does. They order a meal, they take a photo and post it. They find a dead body, they do the same. The police tried to clamp down on the distribution of the crime scene photos, but it was too late. Jane sees the phones being taken out at the Three Sisters, studied, handed around, but mages to decline with a semblance of sanity when someone offers to show her what's on one of them. She's seen it all, already.
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