I don’t know what I was expecting from this book but an addictive murder mystery was not it. While this book is about Dorothy Gale, it has nothing to do with the land of Oz. It is a historical murder mystery. We start with a tornado ripping through a community and everybody looking for Dorothy. She is missing for four days. She just walks out of field and says here I am and I have been in Oz. Dorothy is a tad bit scared because she melted a witch. The community thinks she’s crazy. And until a few days later when one of the matriarchs of the town is found dead with her face melted off. The first half of this book is “what to do with Dorothy”. Did Dorothy do it? The town has a hearing (not a trial) to show if evidence can prove Dorothy could have killed this woman. The evidence is interesting and intriguing and me going WTF!   Dorothy is sent to live in an asylum. And that takes us the halfway point. 

The second half of this book is learning more about the towns people because there is somebody who thinks this can’t be Dorothy and they’re bound determined to prove it. Listening to this book it felt like a cross between the old movie Return to Oz. At least the part of that movie before she ends up back in Oz, and To Kill a Mockingbird. That seems like a weird comparison, but that’s just the way it made me feel. The second half of the book feels like different version of an old show called Christy. A big city lady coming into a new town and a type of life she doesn’t understand but trying to make things happen. This book was addictive. It was engrossing and the entire time I’m listening it I keep thinking - I want this for Book Club. I want to talk to other readers; I want to talk to all my Oz loving friends and ask “What do you think?”. At the end of the audiobook the reader is notified that the author has died, and this was their last work. I haven’t read anything else by this author and it’s a shame that he is gone because I would read what he would do next.