Half Moon Bay
A Novel
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
“An eerie, tense, and finely written novel…Readers will grip their chairs” (SFGate.com) as they try to unravel this tale of psychological suspense from the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of Turn of Mind.
Jane loses everything when her teenage daughter is killed in a senseless accident. Devastated, she manages to make one tiny stab at a new life: she moves from San Francisco to the seaside town of Half Moon Bay. Jane is inconsolable, and yet, as the months go by, she is able to cobble together some version of a job, of friends, of the possibility of peace.
And then, children begin to disappear. And soon, Jane sees her own pain reflected in all the parents in the town. She wonders if she will be able to live through the aching loss, the fear all around her. And as the disappearances continue, she begins to see that what her neighbors are wondering is if it is Jane herself who has unleashed the horror of loss.
Alice LaPlante’s “well-crafted novel of psychological suspense” is a chilling story about a mother haunted by her past, a “brooding suspense novel…dark, starkly beautiful…LaPlante uses a seductively dangerous landscape to mirror her heroine’s inner life” (Kirkus Reviews).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this well-crafted novel of psychological suspense from bestseller LaPlante (Coming of Age at the End of Days), 39-year-old Jane O'Malley moves from San Francisco to a village on the California coast near Half Moon Bay, where she works with plants at Smithson's Nursery in an effort to get over the death of her 16-year-old daughter, Angela, in a car accident and her divorce from husband Rick, which was a consequence of that tragedy. Then, five-year-old Heidi McCready disappears, and her body turns up carefully wrapped in a blanket left in a field eight days later. More children go missing, much to the consternation of the members of the little community. Jane feels empathy for the bereaved parents, but her erratic behavior causes the FBI to consider her a suspect. The seductive Edward Stanton, an environmental activist, and his beautiful companion, Alma Godwin, who happen to know about Jane's losses, challenge her to move beyond her pain as a surprising climax approaches. This complex character study will appeal as much to mainstream fiction readers as genre fans.
