by Anita Shreve
First published 2002
A photographer arrives to document a brutal crime from the 1800s. She sifts through evidence and testimony from the legendary murders that shocked a small community decades before her birth. As she reconstructs what happened between the victims and their killer, the details begin to consume her thoughts. The deeper she digs into witness accounts and crime scene remnants, the more the past seems to bleed into her present. Her professional distance crumbles as she finds herself emotionally entangled with people long dead. The century-old betrayals and passions pull at her until she can no longer separate her own life from the tragedy she came to photograph. What started as research becomes an obsession that threatens to overwhelm her completely.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, crime, psychological-thriller, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: obsession, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Small Community
Period: 1800s, Present Day
246 pages · Paperback · Back Bay Books
Content warnings: death, murder, violence