mystery reviews – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

One good thing about being sick is that in between naps, coughing fits, randomly snotting all over my pillow and light hallucinations, I can get a fair amount of reading done. I was really hoping not to lose two more days this week but this is legitimately the sickest I’ve been since the last time I had COVID and right now I’m just hoping to be functional enough to go in on Monday.

Anyway, The God of the Woods is real real good, a missing persons story worthy of Tana French at her best, and you ought to read it. The story bounces around from the 1950s to the end of 1975, set mostly at a summer camp in the Adirondacks, a camp run by a multigenerational wealthy family that appears to own or employ most of the town it’s set in. The twist here is that while Barbara Van Laar has gone missing in 1975, her brother Peter Van Laar (the fourth, no less) also disappeared at the same camp fourteen years prior. The book bounces around several different timelines, giving a host of characters both inside and outside the family and inside and outside the investigation time as POV characters, and does a great job of both juggling multiple mysteries and character arcs and tying them all up in a satisfying fashion at the end. I have said this before; I am not the world’s most careful reader, unfortunately, and I’m further impaired by this bastard of a head cold I’ve got going on right now, so the fact that I was able to keep up with a mystery novel that was jumping around between three different timelines and half a dozen characters without completely losing track of what was going on is a testament to the author’s skill. I wasn’t aware of Liz Moore before this, and buying the book was a bit of a dice roll (to be honest, the title had me thinking there were going to be some spec fic/ horror elements, and … I admit, having finished the book, I’m not sure I get the title) but it’s one I’m glad I made and I’ll be checking out more books by her in the future.

Short and sweet, I know, but as I said, I’m kind of dying here, so just trust me on this one. You’ll like it.

A touch of housekeeping first– I have parent/teacher conferences after school tomorrow and Tuesday, and am expecting to get home a shattered wreck of a human being both nights, so I’m going to do my damnedest to get three book reviews written today so that I don’t have to get home and scribble something down after 13-hour days at work. In accordance with prophecy, this means that I absolutely will get home and scribble something down after both of those 13-hour days, but still.

Dana Elmendorf’s In the Hour of Crows is one of those books where I heard about the premise and then suddenly had the book; I don’t recall spending money or making an active decision that I needed to own it, but I heard “Appalachian gothic horror about a young woman who can raise the dead” and then it was on my unread shelf somehow. It’s a quick read at only 288 pages, and I started it before bed one night and finished it the next morning. The main character, Weatherly, has the ability to raise the dead by “talking the death out of them,” which I can imagine being the premise for something utterly ridiculous and instead ended up being this cool Christian/aboriginal syncretistic thing where she starts by whispering secret Bible verses into a dead or dying person’s palm and ends with her absorbing their deaths and literally spitting the substance of their deaths out into a nearby vessel, one that can never have contained alcohol before she uses it. She can only do this once for any person; if she tries it again, it won’t work, and her powers must be deliberately passed on to someone else before she dies.

Like, right away, yup, I’m in, and let me remind everyone again that part of the reason I like most of the books I read is that I have years of practice in determining what I like to read and what I don’t. And I was utterly on-target on this one; between the setting, the approach to magic, and the characters (Weatherly’s grandmother, who despises her, is a standout) I ended up really enjoying this one. The book actually ends up being a murder mystery, as Weatherly attempts to save someone and fails, leading everyone to assume that she did it on purpose, and her cousin Adaire’s death in a car accident ends up being wrapped up in that death. Weatherly herself is a bit of a hellion, or at least recovering from her hellion years– she’s in her early/mid twenties in the “now” of the book, but it jumps around in time quite a bit– and her utter lack of concern for what the law might want in any particular set of circumstances is occasionally kind of hilarious. Pretty much every move she makes makes her look more guilty of murder, and she … just does shit anyway, because she wants to. She’s great.

The book also features the single most disrespectful and petty funeral service I have ever seen in print; it’s probably only a couple of pages in total, but it’s the thing I’ll remember the most about this book after the details have faded on the rest of it.

I think this is Elmendorf’s debut, and I kind of hope she stays with this wider setting and style of book in the future, as I’d love to read more of it. More books about Weatherly probably aren’t super likely, but if she wants to write an actual sequel of sorts, I’d love to see something about the grandmother. Definitely give it a look.