FICTION

Long Bright River

Riverhead. Jan. 2020. 496p. ISBN 9780525540670. pap. $26;. F
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Two sisters, thick as thieves when they were children being raised by a bitter grandmother, are now estranged as adults. Kacey is a prostitute, lost to the streets of Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood, and feeding the same need for opioids that killed the sisters’ mother. Single parent Mickey, a police officer working that same neighborhood, is valiantly juggling the demands of adored four-year-old son Thomas and a job she loves. Mickey is drawn into a string of murders of prostitutes, terrified that her missing sister may be the next victim and alarmed that the Philadelphia Police Department does not seem to be following crucial leads. Mickey reaches out to an old partner for help, but ultimately she conducts a solo search for her sister that imperils all she holds dear and drags her back to a past riddled with unanswered questions.
VERDICT In her fourth novel (following The Unseen World), Rome Prize–winning author Moore blends the reality of today’s deadly opioid crisis with a complicated family dynamic to create an intense mystery with stunning twists and turns. Impossible to put down, impossible to forget. [See Prepub Alert, 7/1/19.]
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