When she disappeared from her rural hometown, Wendy White was a sweet, family-oriented girl, a late bloomer who’d recently moved out on her own, with her first real boyfriend and a job waiting tables at the local tavern. It happens all the time—a woman goes missing, a family mourns, and the case remains unsolved. Stacy Flynn is a reporter looking for her big break. She moved east from Cleveland, a city known for its violent crime, but that’s the last thing she expected to cover in Haeden. This small, upstate New York town counts a dairy farm as its main employer and is home to families who’ve set down roots and never left—people who don’t take kindly to outsiders. Flynn is researching the environmental impact of the dairy, and the way money flows outward like the chemical runoff, eventually poisoning those who live at the edges of its reach.
Something happened to Wendy and the town seems satisfied to ignore it. Everyone, except Stacy Flynn, is willing to go on with their lives. Flynn is the local journalist but an outsider, her story of Wendy’s death causes a chain reaction and Alice is right in the middle.
This murder mystery gripped me right from the beginning. I couldn’t put the book down! There is a lot of questions raised on justice, ethics and the doing things for the good of human kind. It explores prejudices within communities, touches on environmental issues and is so realistic that I won’t be surprised if I picked up the newspaper and read about Wendy White and Alice Piper.
The narrative switches from first to third person and from different view points, so the story is fleshed out by all parties. The insertion of the video and audio interviews from some of the minor characters was a great touch and added an extra layer of reality to the book.
Cara Hoffman did an excellent job in this debut novel.
[review book from publisher]
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