When a young woman goes missing, a professional searcher with uncanny empathetic skill works heroically to find her. A powerful, cathartic story of casual evil and of how even the worst things can and must be faced. Part Southern gothic, part crime, part haunting suspense story. You Believers takes us on an infinitely harrowing journey that rewards the reader with insight into how we might endure horrible events with faith, strength, and grace even while it reveals the ripple effects of random violence. Offering a vision that is both ruthless and utterly compassionate, Bradley celebrates the tenacity of the human spirit and renders the search for logic, meaning, redemption and hope in the domino force that is human nature. ( )

My blog post about this book is at this link. ( )

Multiple voices are employed to stunning effect in this novel of those who are lost and those who find. Bradley's powerful writing catapults the story of a missing young woman into an engrossing character study that examines in meaningful and sometimes unexpectedly moving ways the actions of all the players in the story: those who love and miss her; those who search for her with their own versions of hope; and those who are responsible for her being lost. The voice of Shelby Waters, the finder, is particularly strong, and resonates with equal parts compassion, hope, and world-weariness. Thank you, Ms. Bradley, for being bold enough to allow your characters to have all their gray areas. When a writer trusts her readers enough to do that it's an honor to spend time lost in their words.

Favorite Passage

My momma, she kept pretty plain, but she liked to look at colorful things. She liked to serve pinto beans in the pale blue bowl. And cornbread on the dark blue plates. She liked to serve the bacon on the yellow platter. I never knew that old Fiestaware was worth anything. I just wanted it because my momma loved it...There's often much comfort in useless things like the choice of pinto beans in a pale blue bowl and not the white. ( )

I admit that I bought this book primarily for the creepy cover. I can't believe that the book hasn't sold more copies based on the cover alone! This is a story of a girl that goes missing, though the details of her abduction aren't really a mystery to the reader, since we see Katy get abducted from a first person perspective early on in the book. The novel is told from alternating points of view and Katy, her killer, her mother, her fiance', the woman who specializes in finding the missing, and other involved characters lend their points of view. There are some supernatural elements to the story but they are very minimal, unlike what the cover would suggest. There is also a subtle Christian fiction theme in there, though not so much as to detract from the story. I really enjoyed most of this story, but I have to admit there were parts that were almost too intense to read. It made me reluctant to pick the story up again because I was afraid of what would happen next. The villan, Jesse, is almost too real. He is a good-looking, charming, affluent kid from a nice neighborhood who was adopted at a young age, though clearly not young enough. His narcissism, entitlement, and sociopathy were well described and he was vividly realistic and terrifying. The other characters, though flawed, were likeable and characters I would have wanted to know. Rating this book is challenging because the story was really very good and well-written. However, I'm going to take a half star off because it was almost too hard to read. This is a dark, uncomfortable, terrifying story, with some goodness sprinkled in. It really examines the concepts of evil, what it is like to lose someone you love, and have to live with not knowing what happened to them. It really pulls on many emotional experiences, which for some, may be a little too intense (me!). ( )

psychological suspense, grief-fiction ( )