Heather

 

Two missing girls. One cold case. Thirty years of silence.

Heather by Caitlin Mullen pulled me in from the first chapter and never let go, which is saying something for a book this patient.

Two timelines. In the present, Callie Hauser comes back to her small New Jersey hometown to take over as chief of police and she's walking into a buzzsaw. The officers she outranks her resent her, the town hasn't decided what to make of her, and she's trying to prove she belongs. A routine DUI arrest sets off a chain of events she never sees coming, and it pulls her toward a decades-old cold case: an infant found dead in the Pine Barrens, around the same time two teenage sisters disappeared.

The other timeline belongs to Annabelle, one of those twins, and it broke my heart. She and her sister Sabrina are basically raising themselves. Their mother is gone, their father checked out. They couldn't be more different. Sabrina is bold and reckless with a reputation; Annabelle is the rule-follower with her eyes on college and a way out. Then Sabrina starts seeing an older man and goes quiet, and Annabelle just wants her sister back.

This is character-driven crime fiction. Callie is tenacious to the point of stubbornness. She'll throw herself at a brick wall a hundred times, but she can also be weirdly blind to what's right in front of her. That contradiction made her feel like a real person, not a detective archetype.

The audio is excellent. The three narrators Christine Lakin, Bailey Carr, and Mia Wurgaft each bring a distinctive voice and emotional weight. I never once lost the thread of who I was with or which timeline I was in. That's not easy to pull off in a dual-timeline book.

Yes, it's a slow burn. But it's the kind where the patience is the point. I was so wrapped up in these women I never wanted it to go faster. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Hand this to anyone who loved Liz Moore's The God of the Woods or Long Bright River, or Chris Whittaker's We Begin at the End and All the Colors of the Dark.

⚠️A real heads-up on this one: there are several heavy trigger warnings. Go in aware.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the gifted early listen. Heather is out June 9.

if you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in Missing.

About the Author

Caitlin Mullen is the author of Please See Us, which won the 2021 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was named a New York Times best crime novel in 2020. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and children.

For more news and information about Caitlin and her books, visit her website.