Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Five top mysteries about characters searching for relatives

Sarah Stewart Taylor is the author of the Sweeney St. George series and the Maggie D'arcy series. She grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College, Dublin, where she studied Irish Literature. She has worked as a journalist and writing teacher and now lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries.

Taylor's new novel is The Mountains Wild.

[See--The Page 69 Test: The Mountains Wild.]

At CrimeReads she tagged a few "favorite mysteries about characters searching for relatives—and themselves." One title on the list:
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

In Laura Lipman’s terrific 2007 novel, based on the real-life disappearances of the Lyon sisters from a mall in Wheaton, Maryland, Heather Bethany, the fictional version of one of the long-missing-and-presumed-dead sisters reappears one day, the suspect in a hit and run accident. For the detectives who were never able to find the missing sisters, it feels like the conclusion to a horrible mystery. But things are more complicated than that and Heather doesn’t do or say the things she’s expected to do or say. In fact, she doesn’t want to talk about what happened to her and her sister Sunny.

One of the best things about the novel, to my mind, is the complex portrait of these sisters, as adolescents before they disappear and in the imaginations of those who loved them and ... well, to give anymore away would be a crime, but it’s Lippman’s skillful portrait of Heather and Sunny Bethany that stayed with me long after I’d read the twisty, revelatory, and believable resolution.
Read about another entry on the list.

What the Dead Know is among Kathleen Donohoe's ten top books about missing persons.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.

--Marshal Zeringue