Innocence
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"The dark corners of the human soul are Karen Novak's specialty, and there are few writing today who able to illuminate them with such courage and elegance." -Karen Karbo
When private investigator Leslie Stone's own thirteen-year-old daughter, Molly, attempts to hire her to find a vanished friend, the case stirs memories of one from Leslie's own troubled childhood: a series of abductions of girls who became known as the Nightingales. Five eighth-grade boys are being charged with assaulting Molly's friend. But even as their small town erupts in anger and calls for justice, Molly insists that the boys are innocent, and takes the stand to testify on their behalf.
Leslie's investigations show that although Molly may be right, someone is guilty. As the case draws her own secret knowledge of the Nightingales' history toward the light, she is left uncertain of every instinct except the one that demands she protect her child- even if she has to betray her own childhood by telling everything.
"A smart, realistic tale of female identity and deception." -Time Out New York
"This will surely be touted as a suspense novel, and suspenseful it is. But this elegantly written and intricately plotted work transcends genre... This frightening and mesmerizing book deserves a wide readership." -Library Journal
"A tantalizing page-turner." -Cincinnati CityBeat
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leslie Stone, private investigator, semi-estranged mother and wife, and bearer of a dreadful secret, nearly commits a murder in the first pages of this quiet, complicated thriller by Novak (Five Mile House; Ordinary Monsters). The scene serves well as an introduction to a woman literally haunted by the past: Leslie has visions of dead children, stemming from a series of 20-year-old child molestations whose ramifications ruined her father's reputation and effectively ended her childhood. Now events further threaten her precarious mental equilibrium, as she finds herself caught up in a different string of events, which mirror the earlier abductions. Lydia, once a friend of Leslie's own 13-year old, Molly, has grown up fast and loose. Sexually knowing, popular and wild, she disappears after a party at her house and, when she finally turns up, has been sexually abused. As the case and Molly's involvement in it become murkier, Leslie is forced to confront her own past in order to refigure her relationships with the members of her family both living and long dead. The plot moves slowly and mostly without suspense readers will guess the secrets long before they're revealed but the three principal female characters (Leslie, Molly and Lydia) come vividly to life. The mystery takes second place to Novak's ability to describe the complexity of female relationships and the odd mixture of innocence and knowing, of childish simplicity and difficult secrecy, that characterizes girls on the cusp of adulthood girls who are the real focus here.
