A teenager girl goes missing in a small midwestern town. People love to tie a neat bow around things, and collectively focus their suspicion on a mentally challenged young man, a local working for the curmudgeonly school bus driver, Alma, and her husband. Weaving sorrow, mystery and hope, this story keeps you reading along right to the end.
An injured girl is recovering in the hospital, while two regular visitors quietly sit by her bedside and forge their own relationship apart from her. This girl goes on to live with a family member, as she has no apparent nuclear family to take her in. The storyline ping pongs back and forth, from her early years, to the "present" (the 1980s), and to the past of one of her hospital visitors. Gradually these threads all coalesce, and you realize what they've all lost, gained and are seeking. With elements of racism, classism, homelessness, mental illness and abandonment, I can't say this is an uplifting book, but there are triumphs, too.
This book has such a cool premise: the Alaskan town of Point Mettier is so remote (reachable only through a tunnel carved through a mountain) and the climate is so harsh that everyone lives in one apartment building. There's no downtown--the store and everything else is in the same building. The school. The police. Everything. The military base next door is abandoned, so even that stands as only a ghostly memory of more lively times past. Well, there's a murder, and whaddya know? A storm blocks the tunnel. So an Anchorage detective, Cara, ends up stuck there, trying to piece together the fragments of the puzzle, while finding out what the back stories are of the people she's investigating. There's plenty of fodder there, held captive by years of habit, lore and fear. And maybe Cara has a secret or two of her own . . . A great read. There were two metaphysical references in the book that didn't ever seem to get addressed, but maybe the author is leaving things open for a sequel. I'd read it!
