I was pulled into this book just from the back cover description alone. A woman sees a child fall from the back of a ferry, and jumps in to rescue him. The ferry has continued on without noticing, and by the time she gets to shore with the alive but unresponsive boy, there is no one around. There are no desperate parents waiting for him, and when she calls the police, they doubt her story. I just love how simple the premise is: suddenly there’s this child, and what are you going to do?
The plot alone probably could have carried the whole book for me, but rescuer Troy is now one of my favorite protagonists. She is a journalist for a small-town newspaper in the Adirondacks, mostly covering local sports, and she lives a mostly commitment-free life with a house that she rents rooms from to visiting athletes training for various winter sports.
The writing style matches her perfectly: clear and crisp without a lot of unnecessary stylistic nonsense. A wide range of characters are introduced, as well, and they are all interesting and distinct in their own ways, and in their relationships to Troy. I can’t fully describe how realistic everything felt – the situations that came up didn’t seem particularly outlandish, and the characters were all so well-grounded.
Up until the end, that is. I did think the final reveal got a bit jarringly melodramatic compared to the rest of the book, but not enough to mar my enjoyment of the book as a whole. After finishing, I immediately went and got the sequel, in what I hope will be a continuing series.
A Cold and Lonely Place By Sara J. Henry
If anything the second book is even better! The mystery was more nuanced and subtle: a rich-kid tourist is discovered dead in a frozen lake, and gossip spreads about one of Troy’s roommates, who was dating him. Troy starts to investigate only enough to clear her roommate, but soon gets journalistically attached to the tourist’s life story, which unfolds along with the mystery. It is a quieter book, in all, than the first one, but even more realistic, and I couldn’t put it down. In fact, since I’ve finished it, I’ve been sulking that there isn’t a third book out.
Both books reminded me a bit of Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike mysteries, not so much in any concrete way, but just in how much I cared about the characters and was interested in their general lives, as well as the mystery.
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