2019 Amberjack Publishing
256 pgs.
Adult mystery
Finished 7/3/2019
Goodreads rating: 4.13 - 240 ratings
My rating:3
Setting: Flashing back between current times and a decade earlier in rural Pennsylvania
First line/s: "The summer heat arrived in Fallen Mountains like a winged thing, swift and startling: the pansies drooped, the lettuce bolted, the trees shook off their buds."
My comments: I picked this up to read because it's set in contemporary Pennsylvania and I wanted to add some books set in my new home state to my repertoire. It flips back-and-forth from "before" and "after," and it references 11 years ago, 17 years ago...and even before that, so that I never really knew what was taking place when. It worked out okay though, still being pretty easy to follow, but in the end leaving a few unanswered questions in my head that I don't think I missed. There was definitely vernacular that I've only heard in PA, and it made me laugh because it's one of my worst pet peeves - omitting the infinite "to be." Her's an example from the book: "when them cows needed milked, they needed milked."
Goodreads synopsis: “An intense and engaging portrait of characters driven by—and bound by—the secrets of their pasts . . . an absorbing mystery as well as a gracefully layered story of death and loss in a small town.” —Allen Eskens, USA Today bestselling author of The Life We Bury and The Shadows We Hide
When Transom Shultz goes missing shortly after returning to his sleepy hometown of Fallen Mountains, Pennsylvania, his secrets are not the only ones that threaten to emerge. Red, the sheriff, is haunted by the possibility that a crime Transom was involved in seventeen years earlier—a crime Red secretly helped cover up—may somehow be linked to his disappearance. Possum, the victim of that crime, wants revenge. Laney will do anything to keep Transom quiet about the careless mistake they made that could jeopardize her budding relationship. And Chase, once a close friend, reels from Transom’s betrayal of buying his family’s farm under false pretenses and ruthlessly logging it and leasing the mineral rights to Marcellus shale frackers. As the search for Transom Shultz heats up and the inhabitants’ dark and tangled histories unfold, each one must decide whether to live under the brutal weight of the past or try to move beyond it.
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