This one had nothing to do with comp titles or finding something similar to my work in progress, making it (like Batman Revolution) a pure pleasure read.
Jeneva Rose's Home Is Where the Bodies Are is page-turning thriller with a simple enough setup. The family matriarch is dead, and three estranged siblings gather in their Wisconsin hometown to take care of funeral arrangements and sift through her belongings.
Their father disappeared years ago, splitting the family apart. We experience the story through the differing perspectives of the three siblings. Beth, the oldest, never left home and cared for their mother; Nicole, the middle child, struggled with addiction throughout her adult life; and Michael, the youngest, left home and went on to have a lucrative career in the tech space.
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| Image via Indianapolis Public Library |
They don't get along at all, and old hurts quickly go from a simmer to a boil. They fight about their pasts, opportunities unfilled, their strained relationship with their parents and each other, money, and all the other things families tend to bicker about over the course of their lives.
While going through their mother's belongings, they come across a videotape that appears to implicate their parents in the case of a little girl whose death became a high-profile blight on the town. In the video, their father is covered in blood and their mother agrees to help him hide the body.
Is their father a killer? Is that why he disappeared years ago and was later presumed dead? What possible justification could their parents have for trying to cover up a little girl's death?
Slowly but surely, the siblings follow the clues and tease out new bits of information. Expect shocking revelations and some twists that may require the slightest suspension of disbelief in order to swallow.
I'm sure frequent mystery readers will have it figured out less than midway through, but I found it to be a generally absorbing read.
