August 12, 2019
The latest from Shreve (You Are the Love of My Life) is a stirring tale of an elderly woman seeking the truth about her mother’s six-decade old murder in Missing Lake, Wis. In 1941, Georgie Grove’s mother was found strangled; her father confessed to the murder the following day. In 2007, on her 70th birthday, Georgie receives a letter from Roosevelt McCrary, an 11-year-old boy at the time of the crime who has a connection to Georgie’s family. Roosevelt still lives in the area where the crime happened and asks Georgie if she’d like to meet. Georgie plans the trip to Missing Lake to investigate, to the delight of her 13-year-old grandson, Thomas, a fledgling writer. The rest of her family agree to go along on the mission, including her son, Nicolas, daughters Rosie and Venus, grandson Jesse, and four-year-old granddaughter, Oona. But the trajectory of the fact-finding trip shifts after Oona goes missing. The story is excellently balanced between Georgie’s internal thoughts and the search for the truth behind her mother’s death. Shreve’s fans will be captivated by the complex narrative of families, secrets, and lies.

April 15, 2019
When Georgianna Grove, a 70-year-old professor of anthropology, plans a family trip from Washington, D.C., to Lake Minnie Ha-Ha in northern Wisconsin, it is not intended to be a cheerful, bonding vacation with campfires and canoes. Georgie's mother was murdered there when Georgie was four, and her father is the confessed killer. Nine others were at the campsite six decades ago, and now one of them, the only other child of the group, has reached out to Georgie in a letter promising details of what really occurred. Under extreme protest and with the suspicion that their mom may be losing her mind, Georgie's grown children and two grandchildren reluctantly join her on a journey up a wild Wisconsin river and into the heart of the mysteries that shroud her past. With a keen sense of place and pacing, Shreve (You Are the Love of My Life, 2012) weaves a subtle but unrelenting pattern of malevolence in this portrait of a woman burdened by the sins of her father and sustained by her unshakable belief in his innocence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2019
Dead parents haunt Shreve's 16th novel (You Are the Love of My Life, 2012, etc.). In 2007, George Washington University professor Georgianna Grove still grapples with the mysterious tragedy that orphaned her as a small child. In 1941, when Georgianna was 4, her father, William, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, went to prison for murdering her mother on a canoe trip to the Wisconsin summer camp he ran. Four years later, William died in prison, leaving Georgianna to face a lonely childhood with unapproachable, anti-Semitic maternal grandparents. In reaction, Georgianna made the concept of "home" central to her research as an anthropologist and has continually welcomed strangers into the house where she raised her own three children. They'd become fatherless themselves at ages 4, 2, and still-in-the-womb when Georgianna's husband died in Vietnam. On her 70th birthday, Georgianna receives a letter from the only other person from the 1941 canoe trip who's still alive. At the time, Roosevelt McCrary was an 11-year-old child who had been hired, along with his mother, to work at the camp despite being black. As an adult, Roosevelt became a part owner of the camp and has retired there. Hoping he has information to exonerate William, Georgianna decides to revisit the camp and nearby murder site for the first time. She drags along her family--grown children Venus, Rosie, and Nicolas, whose work on Barack Obama's campaign hovers in the background; Rosie's 13-year-old son, Thomas, in the throes of grieving his own father's recent death; Nicolas' son, 15-year-old Jesse, and 4-year-old daughter, Oona, coincidentally Georgianna's age in 1941. Georgianna discovers that her parents' lives and deaths were more complex and mysterious than she thought and not truly knowable. Shreve creates a spooky atmosphere with stormy weather, eerie parallels between past and present, and at least one threateningly crazy woman. Even spookier is the backdrop of 20th-century racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigration feeling that are all too familiar today. Part gothic novel, part adventure story, but primarily a meditation on surmounting misfortunes that may lie beyond an individual's control.

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