Where They Found Her. Rating: Satisfactory

“It wasn't until I'd walked up to the car at the front of the line that I heard some voices floating up from the woods. I paused, noticing for the first time that my fists were clenched.”

Connected narratives always shake me.

If everything is connected, then eventually, everything can be revealed. Find a piece of rope on the beach; give it a hard enough tug, and a ship will surface a mile out. If everything is indeed connected, and a steady eye can untangle the truth from a knot of information, then I am in an awful lot of trouble.

Fortunately, most connected narratives are fictional. In these narratives, everyone is just one or two steps removed from everyone else, and everyone drinks from the same wells of heartache and fear and joy and community.

My survival depends on the separation of spheres - for example, if the gas station attendant I pay to send my postcards turned out to be related to a certain police chief, I would be a dead woman.

As it stands, things don't always line up perfectly, and I am alive enough to read lovely books like this one.

Where They Found Her by the dextrous Kimberly McCreight

...is eminently satisfying. Protagonist Molly is assigned to report on the discovery of a dead infant, found in the woods of her small town. Like so many small-town reporters in contemporary fiction, she almost immediately becomes a de facto detective.

McCreight's characterization of a woman recovering from trauma is incredibly deft. Molly is not delicate at the time of the narrative, but she has been broken before, and is terrified of being broken again. For her, the stakes are entirely personal. An interesting narrative might feature a bomb that is about to go off, or a murderer holding a knife to the throat of his terrified victim; these are easy ways to drive the tension of a story. McCreight is far subtler than this in her characterization of Molly, who is driven by pressures that are internal but still critical. Molly is afraid of being a bad mother; she struggles with a sense of inadequacy in her career; she feels a deep need to prove that she is not going to fall back into the personal darkness that haunted her after the loss of a child. These motivations drive her believably through a complex narrative.

The story is rife with tangled layers of individual histories - everyone, it seems, is deeply connected to each other through multiple generations of trauma. This should be incredibly compelling; unfortunately, it is hindered significantly by the frequent intercession of obvious red herrings. Just as in an escape from authorities, poorly deployed distractions only serve to shine a beacon on the thing being hidden.

In Where They Found Her, McCreight's red herrings unfortunately serve to add predictability to the plot. The resolution of the primary mystery of the novel is clear within the first few chapters of the book. The secondary mystery takes slightly longer to unravel, but not by much. As a result, most of the book felt like taking a scenic route to a bolt-hole - I wanted to reach my destination, but the view was nice, so I enjoyed it in spite of my impatience.

I'll add a few additional notes here before we move on to Spoilers: McCreight is so damned good at writing characters. She writes the police who are investigating the murder of an infant with pathos, professionalism, and honesty. She writes a minor villain of the book with sympathy and understanding, and a major villain with realism and deceptive relatability. None of the characters in Where They Found Her are one-dimensional, and all of them are strongly, accurately motivated.

Now, for Spoilers.

This book is ripe for the spoiling.

For all of the predictability of the big mysteries in this novel, the final unraveling of the story blew me away. The twist - and it is a twist, reader - is set up throughout the narrative with beautiful subtlety. In a final, deadly blow to the emotions of the reader, McCreight reveals the father of the murdered infant to have been Molly's loyal, loving husband - the result of his affair with a high school student. The revelation of this fact, and the confrontation between husband and wife, made my heart leap.

I wonder, reader - was McCreight toying with us in this book? I believed that I had a firm handle on where, exactly, the book would end, and as the solutions to the many mysteries of the book were revealed, I felt deeply smug. In the revelation of the husband's infidelity, however, McCreight dealt a decisive blow, revealing herself as a worthy opponent. Although Where They Found Her presents a bumpy read at times, the ending is brilliant. Well done, Ms. McCreight.

Rating: Satisfactory. 

Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?