This is really great. I was exactly in the mood for a mystery with a heavy literary bent. It is not at all conventional in its presentation, structure, and even prose. I’ll clarify that structurally it is kind of like a thriller in its pacing, which is structural with short chapters, but within each chapter time us malleable.

This book does not hold your hand. In no way is it commercial fiction. There is no quotation marks marking speech, there’s no helpful markers for chapters that show what time period the section is taking place.

We follow events around a murder of a young girl in a town, and then ten years later, two women narrowly evade what would probably be sexual assault, but when driving home go over a bridge into a frozen river. Only one escapes with her life.

The very suspect circumstances of the “accident”, as well as what the survivor remembers, and how this correlates to ten years prior, is the main plot of the novel.

However the narrative jumps around often to many different members of town; as such, the town becomes a character that’s explored as much as the events are elucidated. It also is very effective at showing how a tragedy effects a town as the events are happening and how it shapes and molds people.

It’s also pretty effective at displaying wide ranging culpability beyond the typical whodunit as well. The community is somewhat on trial, along with the main suspects, how the people treat the suspects, and how power dynamics and authority and hate and love all play a part in each aspect of what happens.

It tows the line well between enough information to feel the events without it being for shock value or gratuitous. Something make writers in crime thrillers with young female victims can easily mess up. I didn’t feel a male gaze but still understood some characters applying that to women. I thought it was quite well done.

So why not 5 stars? It does meander somewhat, feeling a bit overwritten. It has wonderfully descriptive prose, but as is that danger, it does make any kind of pacing signals basically coherent. And you need to give it a some latitude to get what you pay for, so to speak.

It’s a pretty interesting intersection. Not to many books I’ve read in this genre are capital l Literary. Or perhaps I’m just not as well versed in them. But I certainly felt like I got a lot more out of this than a typical commercial fiction read in the genre and will stick with me longer, having steeped its themes in the prose.