Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Kimi Cunningham Grant

Emlyn’s father abandoned her and her mother when Emlyn was a child, and the trauma has colored her entire life.  Shy and fearful of the world, her life changes when she goes to college and meets Janessa.  But are all the changes for the best?

Janessa is everything Emlyn isn’t–beautiful, popular, at ease in all situations, and wealthy.  And for a reason Emlyn can’t figure out, Janessa is eager to be her friend.  Janessa describes their closeness like that of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry in the Anne of Green Gables novels, that they are “bosom friends” and always will be.

And so they remain until Emlyn meets Tyler, Janessa’s neighbor and friend from childhood.  There’s an immediate attraction between Emlyn and Tyler, but he starts slowly, taking her for ice cream and lunches and picnics.

After several dates Emlyn tells her friend that she and Tyler are seeing each other, and Janessa is appalled.  “Tyler is the ultimate Regrettable,” she warns Emlyn, but she won’t say more than that.  So when Tyler comes calling again and Emlyn chooses him over Janessa, she and her “bosom friend” have a major falling-out.

The Nature of Disappearing goes back and forth in time–when we first meet the child Emlyn, when she sets off for college and meets Janessa, when she and Tyler begin their relationship, and the current time when Emlyn has become a hunting and fishing guide in Idaho.  She and Janessa have stilted, infrequent phone conversations a few times a year, but she hasn’t seen or heard from Tyler in the several years since his behavior left her close to death at the side of a road.

Then Tyler re-enters her life.  She’s at work when he enters her workplace.  He starts the conversation apologetically, saying he knows his visit is unexpected, but it’s about Janessa.  “…I think she’s in trouble, and I need your help.”

Janessa and her partner/lover Bush have become social media stars, traveling around the country, working for Tyler’s company.  Now it’s been a couple of weeks since they’ve been in touch with Tyler–no posts, no phone calls, no texts.  “Something’s wrong.  I can feel it.  And I have to find her.”

Despite her unresolved feelings about Tyler and her fear that being with him again may endanger her hard-fought satisfaction with her new life, Emlyn agrees to go with him to locate the missing pair.  After all, in spite of everything that happened between them, no one has come close to replacing Janessa in Emlyn’s life.

In The Nature of Disappearing, Kimi Cunningham Grant has written an extraordinary thriller.  Emlyn, Janessa, and Tyler are portrayed so realistically, warts and all, that the reader is able to empathize with them about their behavior and at the same time become angry at what they are doing to themselves and each other.  This is a crime novel that asks questions about life, love, and relationships that are not easy to answer.

You can read more about the author 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.

These Silent Woods is one of the most fascinating and well-written mysteries I’ve read this year.  Not a traditional mystery or crime story or thriller, it has elements of all three as well as showing a loving relationship between a father and daughter that reminds me of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Cooper and his daughter Finch live in a rustic cabin in the woods, without electricity or running water, far from (almost all) neighbors.   Only two people know they are there–Jake, the owner of the cabin, and a man called Scotland who lives some miles away and comes by on unannounced and infrequent visits.

Cooper and Finch have been in the cabin for nearly eight years, almost since Finch’s birth.  The reason they are living there is revealed slowly at different points in the novel, but it’s obvious that Cooper is a man who is hiding from the world.  He keeps a loaded Ruger under the extra pillow on his bed, has a locked gate at the front of the property, puts his car behind the house where it cannot be seen, and has given Finch the codeword “root beer” to tell her to hide beneath the trap door in the kitchen should an unexpected visitor stop by.  And except for Jake and possibly the Scotsman, all visitors would be unexpected and definitely unwelcome.

Finch has never been in a store, a school, a library, or anyone else’s home.  She has never had a playmate nor, as far as she knows, does she have any family besides Coop.  But she is a happy girl, and as the book opens she’s eagerly awaiting their annual visit from Jake, Coop’s army friend and the man whose life Coop saved in Afghanistan.

Jake brings supplies that must last from one yearly visit to the next so that Coop doesn’t need to shop.  He always arrives on the same date and brings something special for Finch, so on December 14th Coop and Finch are ready.  Finch has her own gifts for Jake, a bone knife that she made and a bunch of pressed violets.  But morning turns into afternoon and afternoon into evening, and still Jake doesn’t come.

Then a memory comes back to Coop, Jake saying the previous year, “You know if I don’t come, one of these years, it’s because I can’t.”  And Coop understands that the injuries that his friend received in Kabul are going to end his life sooner rather than later.  Now that year has come.  There was no way for Jake to contact Coop–no telephone, no post office box.  Coop and Finch are on their own.

Kimi Cunningham Grant has written an outstanding story that will stay with you long after you close the book.  The characters are beautifully portrayed, and the way the plot unfolds is masterful.

You can read more about her 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.