This mystery/horror follows widower Aaron Decker. His wife, Allison, dies suddenly in a mass shooting and one day in the months following her death, he starts to go through some of her things. He soon finds pieces of information that lead him to believe his late wife was hiding things from him and might not be who he thought she was. Picking up the breadcrumb trail, Aaron becomes obsessed with finding out what Allison was doing no matter the consequences.
TW/CW: mass shooting at a mall, drowning
The horror elements in this book were really interesting and weren't entirely what I was expecting. On NetGalley, this was listed in the General Fiction and Horror categories so I was expecting the horror to play a larger role in the story. I'm not sure what parts, exactly, the author/publisher thought put the book in that horror category, but I found the horror aspects to be the quiet, creeping sort. Personally, I thought this book fit better in the mystery category with some light supernatural horror elements to it. So if the horror tag is making anyone question if they want to read this book or not, I'd say to give it a go. There are numerous times in the story where lights are clicking on out of nowhere or Aaron thinks he sees Allison in his peripheral vision but none of those things really seem to scare Aaron. The story is told in first person so we are in his head the whole time. Since he wasn't scared of his closet light turning on randomly, I found myself equally unconcerned with it (despite the fact that if that happened to me, I'd be sleeping at least in another room if not in a hotel). The horror aspects really came in, for me, in the last 40% or so. We're following Aaron's investigation into these small, rural, towns were it felt like every town was the beginning of a horror movie where the town is a little run down and the inhabitants are just a little off-putting. It was a very atmospheric horror element instead of a more obvious body horror or haunting sort of horror. We also get some good ol' Appalachian folk lore which really heightened the spooky feelings the story had already set up. There is a supernatural ghost-y type element to the story which isn't clear at the beginning if ghosts are real or if Aaron is just imagining things.
I really enjoyed how Aaron's grief was handled in this story and I think this book ranks right up with Stephen King's Pet Sematary for me for how well it articulated and explored grief. Since we are in Aaron's POV throughout the whole book, we are really in the nitty-gritty emotions with him as well. Everything from that feeling of having the rug pulled out from under him after the shooting to being frustrated and a little angry over the secrets Allison kept from him and never being able to get an answer as to why. There are also multiple instances where the narrative shifts to a second person-ish POV with Aaron speaking directly to his Allison. We get passages where he's telling her things directly or asking her things. It always came as a bit of a shock reading along and then suddenly being talked to directly. Despite Aaron usually throwing in his wife's name when the switch happened (for example, "you, Allison, would always wear your hair like that"), him addressing his wife as 'you' always pulled me into the story more. These moments where he is talking directly to his dead wife really highlighted the emotional journey Aaron was on as well as the impact of his investigation. I do wish we would have gotten some more scenes with people who knew both Aaron and Allison in order to get a hint of an outside perspective of how he was holding up while going through all this investigating.
My only complaint is that the pacing and investigation thread lost me at bit in the middle. I understand that Aaron's grief and curiosity are what got him started following his wife's footsteps at the time and I can see at the end when all the puzzle pieces were coming together that he'd want to finish what he'd started, but I didn't get a very strong sense of his drive or reasoning in the middle of the story. There are mentions about him still missing Allison, but every time he has to explain to a new person what happened to her, it seems to hurt him more and more. I just didn't understand what he was getting out of this investigation that was greater than the pain it was causing him. The investigation pacing in the middle was also a little strange. We know Aaron is driving all around, trying to figure out what his wife was doing and why she kept it a secret but I didn't have any really good time-frames for all of these stops in all of these towns. There were a few times where it mentioned Aaron went back home but then it seemed he left the next day to a new place. In the beginning of the story, we got some time-frames but it seemed like those went away once Aaron started investigating. And, of course, this could be entirely on purpose because Aaron could be so obsessed with finding the truth that he doesn't notice how long he's been away. But as a reader, I needed a few more mile-markers thrown in to help with my mental pacing. We find out toward the end that his investigation was only a couple months long which looking back makes sense but if the book had said it had been a year, I also could believe that.
I overall enjoyed the investigation thread and thought the reveals were well integrated into the story. I thought the overall premise of the story was really intriguing and I could see myself reading a whole bunch of different mystery/thrillers that are spins on the general concept. I liked how the investigation started off as Aaron trying to find out about his wife, then it changed focus to information Aaron found, but it turned back to focus on Allison at the end. The fact that Aaron was mostly following in his wife's footsteps means that there was a lot of information that we technically already knew but we would get just a little more context for that information when Aaron went to that place. In the last half of the story, Aaron is making more original discoveries but it still had a weird feeling of just following Allison and almost like Aaron didn't have much agency on his own. I also didn't love how there were a certain number of places to visit but it seemed like Aaron only visited a few of them so it made the investigation, to me, feel a little unfinished. I also didn't love how most of the investigation was just Aaron talking to people and them happening to remember something or Aaron reading through his wife's files and finding what he needed. Again, it made it feel like Aaron didn't have much agency or drive in the investigation. All that being said, the individual plot threads came together really well at the end and I enjoyed how Allison's life story connected back in as well since the whole point of this journey for Aaron was getting to know his wife.
Overall, this was a really great mystery that dealt with death and grief and secrets in a very gritty yet overall uplifting manner. I loved the quiet, creeping horror and how the investigation played out. The pacing got a little iffy for me in the middle, but it got right back on track and finished strong.
Thanks NetGalley and Titan Books for the ARC in exchange for review.
Publication date: July 20, 2021.
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