Lori Roy

The author does a wonderful job of slowly building up this multi-layered character study. It's a quiet book, not very fast paced, that gradually pulls you into the lives of the people of this community in the 1950's and their fears, desires, lies and secrets. It's packed with the various stories of the hidden lives of each of these neighbors that twist and wind together into a compelling tale. To say too much about the plot would be to give away some of the shocks that this book contains. show more Suffice it to say that this is a fascinating read as you watch this once respectable neighborhood gradually crumble into chaos around its residents.

It's very suspenseful. I don't care much for "women in distress" type of books where there's a woman in trouble and there's a handsome police officer or detective or neighbor or whatever who you know will eventually save her from the bad guys. This book is so much more than that. The mysteries involved are completely unpredictable in their outcome and will keep you guessing. The book also touches on the racial conflicts in Detroit during that time and how integration affected this community.

This book has so many layers to it and is so masterfully written with genuine, true-to-life believable characters . Recommended. show less

Jenny Jones is thrilled to return to the edge of the Big Cyprus swamp with her father, a summer tradition. She’s about to turn eleven, and that’s the age when she will join the women in her lineage by being granted the gift of second sight, as her beloved grandmother Dehlia has explained. She’s also happy to be at their vacation home because she’ll be able to play with her friends, twins Tia and Mandy. She doesn’t have any friends back in town. All the kids think she’s a witch show more and a weirdo who killed her mother during childbirth. Having friends, even for just a few weeks, means a lot. But a shadow falls over her summer plans when a helicopter flies overhead. It must be looking for Francie Farrow, whose abduction was on the news.

We learn all about that abduction in Episode One of a true crime television drama dramatizing the crime two decades later. Alternating between episodes of the television series and the current time, narrated in Jenny’s letters to her father, the story slowly unfolds. As an adult, Jenny is being stalked and harassed by Francie’s mother Beverly, who became unhinged by her daughter’s unsolved abduction. Her fraying sanity has been shredded by the popular television drama. She’s convinced Jenny can lead her to the missing girl’s body, given her father is the prime suspect in the abduction and is currently serving a prison sentence for another violent offense.

Jenny understands why Beverly is so distraught and doesn’t want to involve the police, against the advice of her friend Arlen. She’s traumatized herself, and has never really come to terms with her kind and caring father being revealed as a monster. She hesitates to become too close to Arlen because the taint of her father’s crime, publicized by the show, has led to her housecleaning business collapsing. She doesn’t want his career poisoned, too. She impulsively decides to move back to the edge of the swamp to live with her aging grandmother to await the final episode, when she will learn for sure if her father was guilty.

Weaving between the two timelines, we learn more about Jenny’s friends, Tia and Mandy, and their new, slightly older neighbor Norah. She’s a strange girl, uninterested in going outdoors, manipulative and moody, but Jenny and the twins are starved for friendship and do what they can to bring her into their fold. It’s only later that Jenny learns what readers already know: Norah was sleeping over in Francie’s bedroom the night she was abducted. It is her testimony that led police to suspect Jenny’s father.

Thrillers that develop characters with deliberation, doling out surprises carefully, are often called “slow burns.” That’s not quite the right metaphor for this novel. It’s more of a gathering thickness in the atmosphere, a heaviness that threatens to pull the characters in, like the treacherous swamp where Jenny hopes to find the elusive ghost orchid on her birthday. As the momentous day approaches she decides to set her sights on a more important quest. She wants to mark her eleventh year by finding Francie. But it’s increasingly hard to sneak away and launch her search as Norah draws them into her orbit and the messy world of adults intrudes. Years later, the legacy of those days continues to pull Jenny into darkness as she awaits whatever the final episode will reveal.

The dramatic countdown to the final episode propels the story along, though the conceit of telling much of the story as episodes in a true crime series isn’t fully exploited. The potential for the dramatic version to get things wrong isn’t entertained; we are to assume it’s the true and complete story, and the producers have uncovered the truth that eluded everyone else. Likewise, the letters Jenny writes to her father only occasionally appear to be letters rather than straightforward first person narration. What actually happened to Francie is likely to be more obvious to readers than to the investigating officers or any of the family members involved, who seem to have missed asking some important questions. The ending, too, resolves things in a way that is not entirely satisfying.

All that said, it’s a deeply absorbing novel, delving into childhood relationships with the complexity reminiscent of some of Laura Lippman’s stand alone novels, creating a world that is almost suffocating in its marshy, claustrophobic intensity.

Reprinted from Crime Fiction Review - https://crimefictionreview.com/the-final-episode/ show less

Arthur Scott moves his family out of Detroit and back to the Kansas farm country he left as a young man. 1967 may have been a time of change in Detroit, but in the rural community the Scotts move to social mores have not yet begun to change. Arthur had left the farm soon after his older sister was murdered, something his mother and remaining sister do not discuss. While the Scott's oldest daughter and Arthur himself soon adjust to their new life, the two younger children struggle to make show more friends and Arthur's wife, Celia, who was determined to make this change work, is stifled by the smaller world of the Kansas community and life with her in-laws. There is also the unspoken mystery surrounding Arthur's sister's unsolved murder and his younger sister, Ruth, is being abused by her husband and in this world, women do not leave their husbands.

Roy does a fantastic job of creating the world of a rural community in Kansas, a place where the coming political and social changes haven't even registered as anything but something happening somewhere else. It's a place with a lot of space, but with a stifling need to keep things as they always have been, even if that means returning a woman to the husband who knocks her around, even if that means never looking beyond the rumors that surround the Scott girl's death. And when a young girl disappears soon after the Scott family's arrival, the community is sure that the man they suspect in the first girl's death must have a hand in the other girl's disappearance.

This book was both a difficult book to read and a difficult book to put down. The crime story was interesting, but the real focus of the book was how difficult it was for a woman to leave a husband who wanted her to stay.

And as an aside, the cover art for this book has nothing to do with the book itself. It features the legs of two young girls. In Bent Road there is one school-age girl, but no very young children. With a book so rich in imagery, this cover is just lazy and does the book inside a disservice. show less

Set in 1967. The Detroit riots push Arthur Scott to move his family back to his hometown in Kansas. He has not lived there for more than 20 years. His wife, Celia, knows he has secrets. Secrets that have burdened him for years. She fears moving back will be too much for her family. Celia knows his sister Eve died all those years ago but doesn’t know the details. She acquiesces to her husband’s wishes and packs up her family to return to Bent Road.

Life there is difficult, a local girl show more disappears and many believe that the same man took her that killed Arthur’s sister all those years ago. The man who is now married to his other sister Ruth is suspected of both crimes. Arthur’s daughter Evie looks remarkably like her deceased aunt and becomes fascinated by the clothes left behind in her aunt’s closet. Their son is unsure where he fits within the family. Arthur’s mother wants the past to stay in the past. Celia is just getting to know her in-laws and doing her best to keep her family together and safe. Life on Bent Road is just as unsettling as she suspected.

Dollycas’s Thoughts
I know why the was nominated for an Edgar Award. It is a fascinating debut and not your typical mystery. It is really a story of family relationships and struggles during a critical time in American history with mystery and suspense woven throughout the story. The characters are captivating and genuine. The family itself is very dysfunctional but so is the entire community. The drama is very real and intense in places, laid back in others. The story ebbs and flows at a comfortable pace, but on the whole is very dark. The author has a gift of drawing you in to the murky waters of this Kansas town. This book was not what I had expected at first but I am very glad I took the journey down Bent Road. show less