Heather

These days, a hell of a lot of mysteries praised by book critics seem based on the same assumption: the vast majority of men suck—they’re murderous at worst and viciously sexist at best. Thus, a book’s villains don’t need much more of a motive than their chromosomal makeup. And, faced with such a shit half of the human race, the primary emotion for the women in these books, as well as for the women reading them, is anger.

This, my friends, makes for dull thrillers, and Heather is indeed dull. Our putative heroine, Callie Hauser, a newly minted small-town police chief at age thirty, is surrounded by crap men. The cops she works with are nasty—all, we’re to infer, because of her gender. Those men in the New Jersey Pine Barrens who aren’t police are lustful, arrogant, rude, and capable of very bad things. (There are two—two!—who aren’t. Woo hoo!)

Honestly, the subtitle of this book could be: Do men make you angry? Well, they should.

But Heather is not a yawn only because its raison d’être is misandry. It is also, more damagingly for a mystery, blandly predictable. We follow Callie as she rather randomly dives into a cold case connected to her mother while ignoring, as far as I could tell, most other police work. As she determinedly, and often with little judgment, pursues the clues, most savvy thriller readers will be ahead of her. (I’d sussed out the main villain by chapter three.) Additionally, the plot relies on more than one silly coincidence, several of which are absurd.

But let’s back up a bit. Callie, at the book’s start, has just learned of a cold case—from 1994—in which a newborn was abandoned and found dead. Who found the dead baby? Her teenage mom, Jenna, who then spent much of the rest of her life as a dysfunctional alcoholic. Jenna has suddenly vanished and now, rather oddly, Callie has decided her goal in life is to solve the decades-old crime. (This during a severe drug epidemic in her jurisdiction which is causing several overdoses a week.)

The book then travels back in time to the lives of twin teenage girls whose mother has abandoned them and whose father has nearly done the same: Sabrina and Annabelle Riley. Sabrina, the wild one, is having an affair with an older man while Annabelle, the good one, is determined to leave their wretched life and go to college. The affair—and anyone with a brain could figure out the man’s identity—derails them both.

As the book moves back and forth over the years, Callie slowly, agonizingly so, zeroes in on the Riley sisters and what really happened to both girls. As she does, she pisses off just about every man she encounters and works with. But she soldiers on because she knows, she just KNOWS, that if she can find out what happened to the Riley girls, she will finally be able to understand her mother, Jenna, and thus somehow put her own demons to rest.

This is a book with many subplots, few of which are done well, characters who are either unlikeable or unbelievable, and a rushed and unsatisfying conclusion. If you’re looking for a book that will either help you fall asleep or make you want to move to an all-female utopia, you might enjoy Heather. I did not.