She won the Al Blanchard best story award for her short story, “Let the Chips Fall”, which appeared in Devil’s Snare: Best New England Crime stories 2024. She is a graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator and lives in Quincy, MA, with her husband and Obi-Wan Kenobi, their very playful cat.
[The Page 69 Test: Half In Love With Death; Writers Read: Emily Ross (December 2015); My Book, The Movie: Half In Love With Death]
At CrimeReads Ross tagged four novels that give a voice to blue-collar communities like Quincy, Massachusetts. One title on the list:
Dennis Lehane, Gone Baby GoneRead about another novel on the list.
Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone vividly evokes violent, drug-filled working-class neighborhoods in Boston and Quincy. It tells the harrowing story of private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro’s searchfor a missing child whose neglectful mother, Helene, seems to have forgotten her existence even before she goes missing.
Their search leads to a hair-raising scene in the Quincy quarries. In the midst of chaos and terror, Lehane conjures the chilling essence of this place that has claimed many lives with lines like: “I could smell that clean, cold, and suddenly frightening odor of a century’s raindrops just before I hit the water.”
Later, Patrick finds himself in a house of horrors in Germantown, one of Quincy’s roughest neighborhoods. The grisly scene where he confronts a child molester wearing “a yellow half T-shirt that left a wrinkled, milky midriff exposed…and a pair of black nylon tights,” is impossible to unsee, no matter how much you want to.
Gone Baby Gone is a bleak thriller full of twists, but it’s also a story about a child in peril that raises unsettling ethical questions. Ultimately, it’s not the plot turns that stay with me, it’s that villain rising like a swamp thing from one of the grimmest corners of Quincy, and Helene, the mother defined by her out-of-control, self-serving indifference.
Gone Baby Gone is among Peter Colt's five top mysteries set in the greater Boston area and Haylen Beck's eight crime novels that focus on the bonds of parent and child.
--Marshal Zeringue
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