Gone Too Long
A Novel
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4.3 • 40 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“This electrifying novel…[is] a gripping mystery with a timely, unnerving message—you won’t be able to look away.”
—People, "Book of the Week"
“A book so good you can’t look away.”
--O Magazine, “Best Books of Summer”
Two-time Edgar Award–winning author Lori Roy entangles readers in a heart-pounding tale of two women battling for survival against a century’s worth of hate.
On the day a black truck rattles past her house and a Klan flyer lands in her front yard, ten-year-old Beth disappears from her Simmonsville, Georgia, home. Armed with skills honed while caring for an alcoholic mother, she must battle to survive the days and months ahead.
Seven years later, Imogene Coulter is burying her father—a Klan leader she has spent her life distancing herself from—and trying to escape the memories his funeral evokes. But Imogene is forced to confront secrets long held by Simmonsville and her own family when, while clearing out her father's apparent hideout on the day of his funeral, she finds a child. Young and alive, in an abandoned basement, and behind a door that only locks from the outside.
As Imogene begins to uncover the truth of what happened to young Beth all those years ago, her father’s heir apparent to the Klan’s leadership threatens her and her family. Driven by a love that extends beyond the ties of blood, Imogene struggles to save a girl she never knew but will now be bound to forever, and to save herself and those dearest to her. Tightly coiled and chilling, Gone Too Long ensnares, twists, and exposes the high price we are willing to pay for the ones we love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gripping, gut-wrenching thriller from Edgar-winner Roy (The Disappearing), a member of the local Ku Klux Klan in Simmonsville, Ga., kidnaps 10-year-old Beth, the daughter of a single mother, in a bungled attempt to scare Beth's Puerto Rican babysitter and the babysitter's family into leaving the area. Unwilling to kill Beth, her captor holds her prisoner in the basement of an outbuilding on a remote property used for Klan business. Seven years later, in 2017, Imogene Coulter, a foe of the Klan who's descended from a prominent Klansman, by chance discovers the basement, where she finds a boy, Christopher, who has been held there since infancy with Beth, and takes him home. Shortly before, Beth had escaped and is in hiding. The tension rises as Beth tries to survive and Imogene fights to safeguard Christopher (and herself) from his captors. Vividly told though somewhat implausibly plotted, Roy's tragic cautionary tale demonstrates what can happen when decent people allow themselves to be bullied into turning a blind eye while others do their worst, including murder. Greg Iles's fans will find a lot to like.
