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There's something bad happening on Hemlock Lane, a dismal strip of seedy businesses in Rock Harbor, Maine. It's where you go if you want to buy meth or sex. It might also be where someone is abducting girls, young women like Grace, suffering from trauma after escaping from captivity but without her captor found, or like two other girls who have been found dead.
Now Grace is guarding her privacy at a country inn, all but closed for the winter, avoiding news and all human connections except for the owner of a local grocery who makes deliveries. She reluctantly lets a room to Aden, whose elderly father has gone missing – possibly just off on an impromptu fishing trip, but Aden's mother is worried. As he begins his search, he crosses the path of Kira, whose daughter, like Grace and the two murdered girls, has gone off the radar. Kira is frantically, doggedly, pursuing every lead while Aden gradually wakes up to the realization that the comforting stories he's telling himself about his dad's fate are less and less likely. Then another man, the same age as his father, is found dead, murdered with the same method as the girls.
We learn their stories in separate chapters, loosely connected but growing more tightly braided together as time goes on, with a few brief but chilling passages from the perspective of Kira's captive daughter, trapped somewhere unknown. Both Aden and Kira learn things about the loved ones they are searching for that call all of their certainties into question, and Grace begins to find it increasingly difficult to maintain her shell of isolation from the world.
With the focus tightly on these three characters, the pieces of the puzzle begin to come together, the emphasis on their efforts, with the police investigation so far at the periphery it's nearly irrelevant. While the trope of girls held in captivity by depraved monsters is a tired cliché, Glass does a good job of developing characters, balancing the quotidian details that make them come alive with ratcheted-up pacing that pushes the story forward in proper beach thriller fashion, leaving readers with a dramatic finish and a moral quandary to wrestle with at the end.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, June 2023
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