by Carol Goodman
Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
BookExcerpt
Website
Twitter @C_Goodmania
Just released (paperback): January 3, 2017
Publisher: Touchstone
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Paperback: 304 pages
Rating: 5
First sentence(s):
She came out of nowhere.
Zombie sighting:
A group of students came out of the diner clutching paper coffee cups and shuffled to the bus stop in a zombie-like trance. -chapter 9, page 80
From the award-winning author of The Lake of Dead Languages comes a chilling new psychological thriller about a professor accused of killing her favorite student in a hit-and-run accident.
Nan Lewis—a creative writing professor at a state university in upstate New York—is driving home from a faculty holiday party after finding out she’s been denied tenure. On her way, she hits a deer, but when she gets out of her car to look for it, the deer is nowhere to be found. Eager to get home and out of the oncoming snowstorm, Nan is forced to leave her car at the bottom of her snowy driveway to wait out the longest night of the year—and the lowest point of her life…
The next morning, Nan is woken up by a police officer at her door with terrible news—one of her students, Leia Dawson, was killed in a hit-and-run on River Road the night before. And because of the damage to her car, Nan is a suspect. In the days following the accident, Nan finds herself shunned by the same community that rallied around her when her own daughter was killed in an eerily similar accident six years prior. When Nan begins finding disturbing tokens that recall the death of Nan’s own daughter, Nan suspects that the two accidents are connected.
As she begins to dig further, she discovers that everyone around her, including Leia, is hiding secrets. But can she uncover them, clear her name, and figure out who really killed Leia before her reputation is destroyed for good?
My two-bits:
Starts off with a protagonist who is unreliable and unlikable in a small college town setting. However, she is forced to pull herself together to figure out the mystery that she has been pulled into. And in so doing slowly had me sympathetic.
Loved learning about some aspects of being a writer and student writers.
Greek mythology plays a part so there are easter eggs to find if you are familiar. If not, you can still enjoy the story for what it is. Or you can enhance this reading by getting quick details from wikipedia.
* review copy courtesy of publisher
* part of Cloak & Dagger Challenge (here)
