Don’t let this happen to your readers-check your facts, even the little ones.When lovely 15-year-old Lucinda Hayes is murdered on a playground in a placid Colorado town, the prime suspect is one of her classmates. This Howler threw me out of the story and made it hard for me to get back into the story world for a while. Readers do pay attention and research matters. I loved the novel, but I have to admit that getting this wrong, when it would have been pretty easy to get it right, made me question what else she got wrong. It is concrete and reinforced steel, which would have taken all of about 30 seconds to find out with a little research here. The statue is 67 feet tall-too big to be marble. “…that the Sam Houston Monument is rising in the distance, towering over the border of Huntsville…As the van speeds closer, the statue reveals itself, gigantic in sculpted marble.” It is not made of marble. On page 144, she references the giant statue of Sam Houston on the highway in Huntsville, Texas (home of the state penitentiary and where Texas’s death row is). I just have one tiny complaint…there’s a Howler.

If you are looking for a good example of how and when to reveal backstory, this will work. This is a multiple POV, non-linear telling that maintains the tension by revealing different parts of the story only when necessary. She chooses to make meaning from the events of the novel by choosing to make things better, to attempt to restore some sense of balance in the way the world views serial killers. Even though it is a “down” ending, the reader is also left with hope, because Saffy, an investigator with the NY state police is working a new case and trying to save a young woman. Ultimately, he is insignificant and the reader is left wishing for the lives the women could have had, the roads not taken, as it were. Interestingly, she manages to humanize a serial killer, but part of how she does it is by making the story about other people, specifically the women in his life, rather than making it about him.

Why do we insist on trying to understand violent men and ignore the lives of the women they kill? What is the nature of choice in our lives and when is it too late to make different choices? What about all the alternate choices we could have made?

(!) The question she is asking here is all about power. It is Kukafka’s second novel and now I will probably have to go read the first one. This book is classified as literary suspense for those of you keeping score.

Book review notes danya