Marilyn's Mystery Reads

I’d never thought of dolls as creepy, but then I read You’ll Never Know, Dear and I do now.

Lis Strenger is the daughter of Sorrel Woodham, a nationally-known dollmaker.  Miss Sorrel, as even Lis calls her, no longer creates dolls or collects them, but their home is filled with them–on the kitchen shelves, in the dining room’s glass cabinets, in the workroom at the back at the house.  Although Miss Sorrel is now retired she still has her projects–repairing dolls with thinning hair, broken limbs, or cloudy eyes for clients who love their childhood companions.

Lis, who came back to Bonsecours, South Carolina with her daughter Vanessa years ago after a particularly painful divorce, is in the kitchen making lunch for herself and her mother as the novel opens.  A woman drives up to the house and walks up to Miss Sorrel’s front porch with a bag in her hand.  Then the three women go inside and gather around the kitchen table, and Miss Sorrel opens the bag and brings out a baby doll.  And the next moment, the visitor, whom Miss Sorrel earlier referred to as Miss Richards, grabs the doll and rushes out of the house with Miss Sorrel following her as quickly as she can.

Miss Sorrel’s claim to fame is that many of her creations were portrait dolls, designed to look like the girls who owned them.  When she sees the face of the one that Miss Richards brought, she is traumatized.  It’s the one she made nearly forty years ago for Janie, her young daughter who later was kidnapped and has been presumed dead for decades.  And her portrait doll, which presumably was with Janie when she was abducted, hasn’t been seen since.

Miss Sorrel tries to stop the visitor, who is still holding the doll, begging her to say where she got it.  In a frenzy, the woman throws the doll against the house’s brick front steps, runs to her car, and drives away.  Getting a closer look, Lis thinks it’s possible that the doll was the one her mother made for Janie, but Miss Sorrel is convinced it is.  She brings the damaged doll into the kitchen, cleans its face, and holds it close to her.  “I always knew one day she’d come home,” she whispers.

Can she be right after all these years?  Her best friend and neighbor, Evelyn Dumont, doesn’t believe it, and Frank Ames, the town’s deputy police chief, is skeptical as well.  Then things take a distinctly ominous turn as a fire in Miss Sorrel’s kiln virtually destroys her workroom and sends her and her injured daughter to the hospital.

You’ll Never Know, Dear will keep you on the edge of your seat.  The many subplots in the novel make for fascinating reading, and the characters and their backstories are perfectly drawn.

You can read more about Hallie Ephron at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.