{"id":9024,"date":"2021-05-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-17T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9024"},"modified":"2021-05-16T18:35:45","modified_gmt":"2021-05-16T22:35:45","slug":"long-bright-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9024","title":{"rendered":"Long Bright River"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Liz Moore – This family thriller, set in Philadelphia, is on a number of \u201cbest books of 2020\u201d lists, and for good reason. Mickey Fitzpatrick is a 30-something female police officer who loves her patrol job, loves her intimacy with the Kensington area that\u2019s her beat, knows who lives there, who serves the best coffee, who the working girls are, and generally tries to keep bad things from happening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s called out to the site where the body of a young woman has been discovered by disused train tracks. The terror coursing through her body doesn\u2019t subside until she sees the dead woman is not her younger sister Kacey, a many-times-relapsed drug user who\u2019s disappeared. Mickey fears the worst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel\u2019s third significant character is Philadelphia itself, whose gritty neighborhoods and obscure loyalties take on real life in Moore\u2019s telling. Mickey has tried many times to pull Kacey away from the dark side, but every time, the drugs lure her back. That\u2019s an old and familiar story, but the way Moore builds the relationship between the sisters makes it compelling nonetheless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mickey is the older of the two\u2014the quiet, bookish one. Kacey was the social butterfly. Their mother died of an overdose, and their father died too. They were raised by their grandmother, a strict and bitter woman with little money and even less affection to share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now Kacey\u2019s in the wind, and Mickey takes every opportunity to look for her. At least at home she has a wonderfully bright son, Thomas, whose dad is an older man, a police detective, who befriended the teenage Mickey. He listened to her, gave her understanding and advice, and she responded to his warmth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I especially enjoyed the scenes with Mickey\u2019s extended family\u2014aunts and uncles, cousins\u2014whom we meet when she drops in unannounced for Thanksgiving. Mickey, with her hard-won academic achievements, is a fish out of water with them. In their opinion, \u201cwork was done with your body, with your hands. College was for dreamers and snobs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mickey doesn\u2019t fit in at work, either. Her boss actively dislikes her, and as the local prostitutes\u2019 death count begins to climb, a frantic Mickey takes some liberties with departmental rules. Her suspicions are mostly ignored and even backfire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The serial killer theme and the good-girl\/bad-girl dynamic are crime fiction staples, but the quality of Moore\u2019s writing and the honesty at the novel\u2019s core make them fresh again. And Moore delivers some surprises along the way that will keep you turning pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Liz Moore – This family thriller, set in Philadelphia, is on a number of \u201cbest books of 2020\u201d lists, and for good reason. Mickey Fitzpatrick is a 30-something female police officer who loves her patrol job, loves her intimacy … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Long Bright River - a crime story that's also a powerful family story. Really well done!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,40,632,126,32],"tags":[1866,1867,435],"class_list":["post-9024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-fiction","category-police","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-liz-moore","tag-long-bright-river","tag-philadelphia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2ly","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9024"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9026,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024\/revisions\/9026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}