The Dynasty That Keeps on Giving

Last week, American Ancestors hosted a Zoom presentation about potential?? English ancestors—those lusty, murderous Tudors. I’ve been a fan of stage, screen, and tv interpretations of Tudorabilia starting with the BBCs The Six Wives of Henry VIII, now more than 50 years ago! and still memorable, on to Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett), up to the salacious (and highly inaccurate) The Tudors in 2007-2010, and the three volumes of the late Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning novels, which started with Wolf Hall, through their stage and television versions (Mark Rylance at his very best). So, of course I couldn’t miss this latest program, led by Curt Di Camillo, curator of Special Collections for the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Here are some tidbits.

Di Camillo started with a little background on what paved the way for the Tudors, and that was the War of the Roses, the Plantagenets—the longest running royal house in Britain—symbolized by the White Rose and the Lancasters (red rose). When Henry VII seized the throne from the reviled Richard III, he created the “Tudor Rose,” red and white a bit of transparent pandering.

(As an aside, if you missed last year’s film, The Lost King, the true story of a persistent English woman who went on a hunt for Richard III’s body, which scholars searched for fruitlessly for centuries, rent it!.)

But what I learned about the first Tudor, Henry VII, was less well known (to me at least). He was reviled as well, considered a usurper, and, possibly worst of all, he was Welch. He was under such threat he created a special bodyguard and designed their uniforms. You recognize them as the Beefeaters, who still wear Henry’s design today. For Britain, at least, Di Camillo says, Henry Tudor’s accession to the crown in 1485 represented the end of the Middle Ages.

He undertook a number of acts to establish his legitimacy. He introduced a gold coin, called a sovereign, that bore his image with the trappings of the monarchy, he married Elizabeth of York (who passed on her red-hair genes to her son and grandchildren). And he added the Henry VII Lady Chapel to Westminster Abbey, which now holds the remains of many English kings and queens. But it was up to his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of Anne Boleyn, to employ England’s first spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, setting the stage for many great spy novels to come.

More information:
American Ancestors/New England Historic Genealogical Society
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Lost King
Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (have not read this one)

The Missing Family

The Missing Family is the latest in Tim Weaver’s popular series of thrillers featuring missing-persons investigator David Raker. Here, Weaver presents an impossible crime, the unexpected tentacles of which stretch clear from England across the Atlantic to the North American continent.

Sarah Fowler hires Raker to solve the mysterious disappearance of her family a year earlier. After a day at a favorite Dartmoor lake, her husband, teenage son, and his girlfriend row the family’s twenty-foot dinghy out onto the water one last time. Drowsy from the sun, Sarah briefly falls asleep—her wristwatch confirms she napped for no more than a minute or two—until her toddler, Mable, awakens her. Halfway across the lake, the dinghy bobs, empty. The police are baffled. The boat’s too far out for the trio to have swum to shore in the available time, not to mention the girlfriend’s arm was in a cast. They find no evidence of violence and have no witnesses.

You don’t stay with the grieving Sarah long, though. In Los Angeles, detectives from two different departments—eventually three jurisdictions—are baffled by a trio of shootings. Five bodies, killed by bullets typically used in hunting rifles, are found in remote areas. Far apart, there’s nothing to link them, and they continue for years as separate cold cases.

In yet a third plotline, at a massive London-area casino resort, the Skyline, a high-rolling gambler and casino investor is viciously stabbed to death. He and the two brothers who own the casino have been best friends for years. Despite the owners’ determination to find the murderer, security camera footage of the victim in the frequent company of another man is notably—possibly suspiciously—uninformative. Who was this stranger?

The brothers also own the world’s largest casino, The Afrique, in Las Vegas. (Coincidentally, I was at a conference in Las Vegas while reading this book, which was almost too much verisimilitude!) Weaver certainly captures the over-the-top, mildly uneasy, anything-can-happen casino buzz.

The suspected murderer returns to the Skyline, is identified (facial recognition software at work), detained, and put in one of the casino’s secure holding cells under guard. When the police arrive to arrest him, the locked cell is empty. It’s another missing person case, which cries out for Raker’s assistance. Raker’s investigations—the missing family and the casino murder and disappearance—work in tandem, while you learn about the West Coast murders through the eyes of the California detectives. A lot is going on. You may suspect that all three plot lines will eventually weave together, but how?

Though the plot is complex, Weaver’s chapters are short and keep things moving. Sometimes he tries a little too hard to end each chapter with a startling revelation, just before the next chapter switches to another plot. That said, you’ll encounter quite a few nifty surprises.

The book is written in both first-person (the Raker chapters) and third-person (all the others), which effectively provides immediacy from the lead detective, plus the differing points of view and voices of other characters. It’s never confusing. Overall, an entertaining puzzle.

Order here from Amazon.

Unexpected Synchronicities

If you’re a frequent reader, sometimes the parallel threads from several books get all tangled up. Characters with the same/similar names in books by different authors. Intersecting plot lines. Or you read one book that gives you interesting background about something (Daughters of Yalta), and soon you read another dealing with the same events (Gods of Deception). You feel like you turned a corner and ran into a mirror.

Two books I’ve read recently were set in Venice—thankfully at totally different time periods (1612 on one hand and 1928, 1938, and 2002 on the other)—but identical geography and modes of transport, and—OK, this is a stretch—the third, a contemporary mystery about life on a canal in England.

The Gallery of Beauties by Nina Wachsman is a new historical mystery featuring an unlikely pair of protagonists—Belladonna, a famous and wealthy courtesan, and Diana, a rabbi’s daughter who lives in the Jewish ghetto. These beautiful women come to the attention of an artist creating portraits for a “Gallery of Beauties.” Intrigue is high in the city’s Council of Ten, whose mistrustful leaders vie with each other for power and prestige, and leading citizens’ fear of poisoning is so great they employ official tasters. Diana must slip out of the ghetto to pose for the artist, but the chance to wear beautiful clothing and mix with the city’s elite, including her new friend Belladonna, convinces her to ignore the curfew imposed on ghetto residents. Out in the city, she could be challenged at any time. When the subjects of the Gallery of Beauties begin to be murdered, the two women must unravel the mystery for their own survival. An indelible portrait of Venice in the 17th century.

The Venice Sketchbook by Rhys Bowen, narrated by Barrie Kreinik, is mostly set during the days leading up to World War II, when English schoolteacher and artist Juliet Browning begins a romance with the wealthy and devastatingly handsome son of a leading Venetian family. As the Nazis close in, Juliet delays her return home until it’s no longer possible to leave. Without papers and out in a city patrolled by fascists, she could be challenged at any time. (!) Sixty years later, when Juliet dies, her niece Caroline inherits her Venice sketchbook and keys to she doesn’t know what. It will be up to her to discover Aunt Lettie’s mysterious past. This book was too formulaic for me, in terms of the plot and the relationships. But again, Venice.

Idiot Wind by Michael Broihier is set on the Oxford Canal, which runs some 70 miles between Oxford and Hawkesbury in central England. The protagonist, Mac McGuire, with his 60-foot narrowboat, Idiot Wind, delivers food and fuel to boat owners up and down a central portion of this canal. The countryside is beautiful, the boat dwellers are quirky devotees to an idiosyncratic way of life, and it’s a peaceful one—that is, until dead bodies turn up in the canal waters. There’s a lot of mechanics involved in opening and closing the canal’s many locks, repetitive actions I actually found quite soothing. It gave a certain controlled rhythm to the story. No wild car chases, just going with the flow. For me, Broihier’s portrayal of life on the canal was a memorable one. But then, any story with boats is OK with me, and this was a dandy.

Juliet, Naked

Juliet, Naked Predictably, I overheard a moviegoer say to the ticket-seller, “I’d like to see Juliet, Naked.” You should see it too (trailer)! Nick Hornby’s novel has been turned into a highly entertaining romantic comedy directed by Jesse Peretz. The strong script is by Evgenia Peretz, Jim Taylor, and Tamara Jenkins.

The story starts with an awkward website video, in which Duncan (played to hilarious effect by Chris O’Dowd) rattles on about obscure American rocker Tucker Crowe, who has not been seen in decades, much less produced any new music. Duncan lives with Annie (the delectable Rose Byrne), who runs a small museum in a seaside British town. The museum’s biggest attraction is a shark’s eyeball, bobbing in formaldehyde.

To the dismay of  megafan Duncan, Annie doesn’t especially appreciate Tucker Crowe, nor how his music has taken over their listening and the mystery of his disappearance their conversation. Like anyone obsessed with in a very small slice of life’s enormous pizza, Duncan is tedious in the extreme. (Juliet, Naked is an album title, I think.)

When Annie posts a few of her less flattering thoughts about Tucker Crowe on Duncan’s website, Crowe himself (Ethan Hawke) responds. To her surprise, he agrees with her, and they begin a secret trans-Atlantic email correspondence. The two have great charm together, playing off each other and admitting their shortcomings. They’re neither one perfect and able to admit it.

Crowe is living in the center of the United States, somewhere, in a garage lent him by his ex-wife, and taking part-time care of their young son Jackson (Azhy Robertson). We soon learn another woman is the mother of his grown daughter, who’s now pregnant, and he has twin boys by yet another. He’s barely in touch with these children and totally out of touch with the daughter of his first love, Juliet.

Perhaps it’s the pseudo-anonymity of email that encourages him to speak to Annie. When he has a trip to London, the face-to-face is awkward. It might be the beginning of a relationship, but there are a lot of kids and partners in the way.

What I loved about this movie, in addition to the fine acting, is that the situation avoids the typical Hollywood relationship clichés (which the movie Puzzle fell prey to, disappointingly), and strives for honesty.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 80%; audiences: 90%.

P.S. I love the crazy job titles that turn up in movie credits. In this one: “Petty cash buyer.”

***Sticks and Stones

funeral

Herry Lawford, creative commons license

By Jo Jakeman – Phillip Rochester was a man who had everything—an ex-wife who acted more like his mother, a current wife, and his new young lover. When this debut domestic thriller opens, these three women are together at Rochester’s funeral, and each subsequent chapter begins by saying how long before the funeral it takes place.

Although Phillip is a malevolent presence in the lives of all three women, who live somewhere outside London, this is really their story as told by his current, albeit estranged and increasingly frantic wife Imogen. About three weeks before the funeral, Imogen visits Phillip’s home. She’s determined to stop his foot-dragging about signing the divorce papers and his increasing demands for more time with their son Alistair.

Imogen eventually leaves without seeing her ex. But she has seen something: evidence that Phillip is bullying his paramour Naomi in the same way she herself had been bullied for years, leaving more emotional than physical damage, though plenty of that too. But Phillip was a police officer, and the one time Imogen reported the abuse, the cops who arrived were buddies of his, and it was clear her complaint wouldn’t go anywhere. In her experience, ex-wife Ruby always takes Phillip’s part too.

Phillip’s begun insisting that Imogen and Alistair be out of their jointly owned house by the end of the month. Otherwise, he’ll fight her for custody of their son. He’s willing to play dirty, bringing up Imogen’s bouts of depression as evidence she’s unfit. When Phillip appears unexpectedly with new demands, Imogen, in a desperate moment, locks him in the cellar. It’s a small act of revenge that feels good, but now what?

By keeping most of the action in Imogen’s house and, even more constricted, the cellar, author Jo Jakeman creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that adds to the story’s power. The house and its disposition become a metaphor for the intimate relationship that has gone awry. Ruby and Naomi appear on the scene, and, over the next few days, power shifts back and forth as first Phillip and the women hold the upper hand. The relationships among these three women are nicely developed and believable, as is Imogen’s mistrust of them. Phillip is less convincing. It appears he’ll stop at nothing to maintain his control over them.

Starting the book with the information that Phillip is dead and the women are not removes a major source of tension from the story. Nevertheless, you wonder how it happens, and the novel takes pains to tell you why. If you’re a fan of the close-in domestic thriller, this may be a book you’d enjoy.

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Listen Up! Take 2

earphones

photo: John O’Nolan, creative commons license

Three notable audiobooks for your consideration: the fantastic debut novel She Rides Shotgun, award-nominee The Breakdown, and Hangman, follow-up to last year’s mega-hit, Ragdoll. Starting with the best of the three.

*****She Rides Shotgun
By Jordan Harper, narrated by David Marantz – Winner of the 2018 Edgar Award for best debut novel, this is the audio equivalent of a real page-turner (though I’m never tempted to listen at 2x speed!). When Nate McClusky leaves prison after refusing to work for the dangerous gang Aryan Steel, a death warrant is issued for him and his family. He finds out how determined the killers are when he discovers his ex-wife and her new husband murdered, and realizes his eleven-year-old daughter Polly will be next. He picks her up at school before the killers find her, and the chase is on. They’re practically strangers to each other, as he’s been incarcerated for most of her childhood. She’s a quirky kid, shy and smart as a whip, teddy bear in tow.

Nate hasn’t had much parenting experience, but he warms to the role, and two have terrifying—and sometimes heartwarming—adventures roaming Southern California, as they gradually become partners in evading their would-be killers as well as the police. Betrayal is a constant anxiety. Based on the premise—the criminal dad, the kid—I didn’t think I’d like this book as much as I did, no small part of which relates to Marantz’s excellent narration.

Another recent and remarkable book about a criminal father raising a daughter was Hannah Tinti’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, also an award nominee.

***The Breakdown
By B.A. Paris, narrated by Georgia Maguire – Another domestic thriller of the “is she going crazy, or is someone doing this to her?” variety. Unfortunately, the big reveal seemed obvious early on, which tarnished the entertainment value. I selected it because the book was on the “Best Novel” short-list for a 2018 Thriller Award. Compared to the other two nominees I read, it falls short of the nail-biting excitement of Gin Phillips’s Fierce Kingdom or the fascination of Dan Chaon’s Ill Will.

Rain on Windshield

Iwan Gabovitch, creative commons license

The story takes place in and around a mid-sized English market town. One night, as Cass is driving through the woods to her isolated (natch) home in a terrible rainstorm, she sees a woman in her car, stopped by the side of the road. Since the woman doesn’t appear to be in distress, rather than get drenched, she doesn’t offer aid. The next morning, she learns the woman has been murdered. And that she knows her.

Guilt over not helping, strange occurrences that make her think the killer may now be stalking her, and fear that, like her mother, she may be suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s make for a pretty mopey outlook. The narration reflects that, though I admire Maguire’s portrayal of the long-suffering husband. You can hear—and empathize with—his growing doubts about his wife’s mental state. If you like the “gaslight” sub-genre, you may enjoy this.

**Hangman
By Daniel Cole, narrated by Alex Wyndham – This book follows on the successful 2017 thriller Ragdoll, and involves some of the same characters, charged with solving a series of baffling murders that hits London and New York. Are they Ragdoll-related or grisly copycats? DCI Emily Baxter, who was key to solving the Ragdoll case, is flown to New York to liaise [!]. I like how prickly she is—don’t try to sweet-talk her for god’s sake! The CIA operative is an engaging character too.

I’m not squeamish, but my lack of enthusiasm for Hangman derives from its excess of sadistic violence, which appeared ramped up for shock value. A male narrator was chosen for the audiobook, though usually the narrator’s gender matches that of the protagonist. Possibly the publishers thought the extreme violence would be better portrayed in a male voice, and Wyndham does a fine job presenting UK and US characters of varying ethnicities.

Read an earlier Listen Up! compilation here.

****Don’t You Cry

Heimlich

pixabay; creative commons license

By Cass Green, narrated by Lisa Coleman, Anna Bentinck, Huw Parmenter, and Richard Trinder – Cass Green’s third thriller for adults deals with the power of maternal love.

In recognition of the ascendant popularity of audiobooks, she chose to have this book come out in audio first. It’s a hybrid of a traditional audio book read by a single narrator and one in which all the dialog is spoken by actors playing parts. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of four characters, and the actors, who are all first-rate, read the entirety of the chapters having their character’s point of view, regardless of who is speaking. I liked this way of doing it—much less jarring than having a group of actors reading lines as in a radio play.

Nina is a divorced English teacher living with her 12-year-old son Sam in a suburban area of England. Sam is about to go on holiday in Provence with his father and his new partner, Nina’s considerably younger replacement. Nina is preoccupied by her resentment and grief over the dissolution of her marriage and is fretting about the impending separation from her son.

At the book’s outset, she’s in a restaurant awaiting a “blind date.” When he arrives, late, he almost immediately propositions her. She’s so shocked, she chokes, and her server Angel’s timely use of the Heimlich maneuver saves her. At least near-death is a sufficient excuse to cut this disastrous date short.

In the middle of the night, Nina is awakened by someone knocking at her front door. It’s Angel, carrying a gun. Soon thereafter, Angel’s brother Luke arrives—blood on his hands and a months’-old baby under his coat. Over the long hours of that night, Nina hears fragmentary news reports revealing that in a nearby town a young mother has been murdered and her baby kidnapped. Though she fears the worst, Nina is helpless, focused solely on keeping the infant safe. The intruders have disconnected her phone, taken her cell phone, and left her with no resources.

If Nina is a bit of an agonized mess, trying to think of ways to escape with the baby, Angel is implacable and anticipates Nina’s every ruse. The character of the brother is especially strong, as he veers between caring and desperation, and in the chapters he narrates, quite convincingly sounds on the verge of mental collapse.

Nina tries to negotiate reasonably with this difficult pair, encouraging them to be on their way and to leave the baby with her. For her, his fate is uppermost and it’s a difficult job keeping him quiet (which may have inspired Green’s title), getting him fed, and finding diaper substitutes.

Green maintains a high degree of tension throughout this long night as the balance of power between the siblings and Nina shifts agonizingly.

However, between Nina’s incessant worrying about the baby and tormenting herself for having to tell Sam he couldn’t come home, she grows a bit tiresome. I would have liked Nina to have had a more nuanced motivation and a few more emotional notes to hit, though as the story proceeds, she shows real courage against a somewhat cardboard foe.

For me, the novel’s strongest characters are Luke and Angel, who have both convincing motivations and the great virtue of unpredictability. On the whole, it’s a good listen.

The paperback version of the book, which will be published next spring apparently has a different title: No Good Deed, which doesn’t make sense to me (nor does the cover photo below). Somebody’s good idea.

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***Animal Instinct: Human Zoo

Elephant - Sam Felder

photo: Sam Felder, creative commons license

By Simon Booker (this is an Audible Original, narrated by Imogen Church with a strong cast portraying the characters). PTSD has left former police detective Joe Cassidy (played by Brendan Coyle—Bates on Downton Abbey) with debilitating panic attacks. To get away from the world, he’s set himself up in a remote cottage on Dungeness Beach in Kent, but the world comes to him when he’s contacted by an old friend. Adam Pennyfeather (Joseph Marcell) inherited a wild animal park, and once saved Cassidy’s life when he was almost trampled by an elephant. Adam’s daughter Bella has gone missing, and he wants Cassidy to help find her. As a friend. As someone who owes him.

Cassidy is also on hiatus from his marriage to Katie (Lia Williams), herself a police detective, who’s handling the investigation of Bella’s disappearance. When Bella’s body is found in the elephant house, strung up like a side of meat, Katie is handed her first murder investigation. This creates inevitable tension between the couple, acting in their official and unofficial capacities.

The fault lines in the Pennyfeather family gradually reveal themselves. Adam’s wife is Isabel (Victoria Hamilton), and his younger daughter is Saffron (Rebekah Hinds). She and her husband, pizza entrepreneur Liam O’Mara (Harry Lloyd), tell Cassidy about Isabel’s lifelong loathing of her younger brother Felix, now Adam’s lawyer, and how Isabel preferred her daughters to her son Gabriel. His birth led to serious post-partum psychosis for which she was hospitalized. Fearing for the boy’s safety, Adam put him up for adoption many years before, and has since learned that Gabriel died in a motorcycle accident.

Trying to worm her way into Cassidy’s orbit is a relentless local journalist, an Australian woman named Chrissy McBride. Brigid Lohrey makes this character so annoying that, along with Cassidy, you’ll probably think, “Oh, no, not her again!”

Cassidy believes his wife is seeing someone, was seeing someone while they were married, at least early on, and that their son Luke is the other man’s child. Three DNA samples sent to a Cambridge lab will tell the tale, but is that information he really wants? Booker builds a nice bit of tension around the receipt of these laboratory results, and with Coyle’s solid portrayal, you can appreciate how torn Cassidy is.

The production includes sound effects of the type a foley artist would deploy in a radio play to indicate a closing door, footsteps, and the like. Possibly this is a matter of personal taste, but the sound effects feel redundant and jar me out of the story.

Animal Instinct is a nicely played, complex story and billed as the first book in a series featuring Joe Cassidy. TV writer Booker will find his listeners looking forward to more.

****White Bodies

strangers-on-a-train

Farley Granger & Robert Walker, the “Strangers on a Train”

By Jane Robins – This is a fun read that puts a 21st century twist on the premise of the famous 1951 Alfred Hitchcock movie, Strangers on a Train. That’s the one where two strangers fall into conversation and agree to murder a person of the other’s choosing. They convince themselves that, since there is nothing to connect murderer and victim, the crimes will be easy to get away with. Right.

But, how would you effect such an anonymous encounter today? Where would you look for such a willing accomplice? The Internet, of course! “The internet is where psychos find each other,” says character Tilda. And Robins makes good use of the strengths and weaknesses of social media in crafting her tale.

The protagonist in this London-based domestic thriller is Callie—a bit socially awkward, insecure about her looks (and everything else), a librarian. The relationship between her and her glamorous twin sister Tilda is explored in both the current time and a succession of flashbacks. Callie increasingly believes that “the perfect man” Tilda has become involved with—the wealthy, handsome, larger-than-life and more than a bit obsessive-compulsive American, Felix Nordberg—is actually quite dangerous.

Desperate to help Tilda, Callie becomes involved with a website called controllingmen.com, where all the classic signs of a relationship headed toward abuse are spelled out, just the way she sees them in Tilda and Felix’s relationship.

But Tilda dismisses her sister’s concerns, and you’ll understand Callie’s bafflement at how to proceed without creating a rift between them. At times you may want to wring her neck for the way she can’t stop herself from blurting out her suspicions. Moreover, she can’t seem to see how her obsession with Tilda and Felix is interfering with her own life.

We know from the first pages that Felix is dead. But was he murdered? The medical examiner says he died from natural causes. Although I thought I understood how Felix died, I hadn’t reckoned with Jane Robins’s diabolical imagination. I had to reread some of the last bits to be sure I understood the extent of the duplicity. That sense of something happening behind the scenes that I hadn’t quite grasped really kept the pages turning.

Robins has written several true-crime and non-fiction books and has a straightforward style that is a nice counterpoint to the emotions rampaging through Callie, and every one of the main characters in White Bodies is believable.

As a side note, a disadvantage to book reviewing is the “promotional cover.” The White Bodies review copy bore a temporary cover with a quote in tall, all-capital scarlet letters, “Everyone wants someone murdered.” Not the kind of thing you can put on an empty train seat beside you for a stranger to see.

****The Missing Girl

junk shop

photo: anyjazz65, creative commons license

Written by Jenny Quintana – In this debut psychological thriller, narrator Anna Flores returns to England after her mother’s death to do what needs to be done—quickly—before returning to her life she’s made in sunny Greece. The gloom and wet of approaching winter practically seep into her bones, and making her escape turns out to be much more difficult than she hopes. And, like all villages (at least in mysteries!), Anna’s childhood home has its dark secrets.

She finds herself burdened by the house and all its memory-filled contents, the divestiture of her father’s second-hand shop, the House of Flores, the encounters with friends and neighbors from her youth.  Though she has been away for three decades, the house, the shop, the people remind her incessantly about the one thing she will not find: her sister Gabriella.

Anna was 12 and her sister 15 in the autumn of 1982 when Gabriella disappeared without a trace. The chapters alternate between the current day and the year Gabriella went missing. You don’t learn much about the decades in between; it’s as if Anna’s life went on pause when she lost her sister.

Anna’s mother, who had been a so-so manager of the shop after her husband’s death, has inexplicably contracted to do a house clearance for Lemon Tree Cottage, a dwelling with painful memories for Anna. In part out of guilt over abandoning her mother for so long, she resolves, with some reluctance, to finish up this last job for her.

Quintana gets the psychology of the piece just right: the dynamic between the two girls, Anna’s adoration of her sister and obsession with finding her, the differing relationships the girls have with their parents, the grief that haunts them after Gabriella disappears, and the lengths Anna will go to in order to deny the possibility Gabriella is dead. The voice of the youthful Anna and the 40-year-old Anna are handled believably.

Long after the police gave up the search, little Anna persisted. One focus of her ill-conceived investigations was Lemon Tree Cottage and its mysterious occupants. Now, decades later, she has a chance to go through every scrap of belongings from the cottage, and she is drawn back into her researches, knowing and expecting she will find nothing.

Quintana has a smooth, absorbing writing style that carries you deeper and deeper into the complicated past of the Flores family. Instead of graphic violence, she chooses to explore the long tail of evil.