Review: “What the Dead Know”
I grabbed this one because an on-line mystery readers group was going to review it. And I’m so glad I did.
The premise of the story deals with a cold case of two missing girls. The Bethany sisters have been missing for 30 years after disappearing from a Baltimore shopping mall. There was no sign of the girls and their bodies were never found. Now one of the girls has shown back up.
What makes this novel interesting is that author Laura Lippman uses six different points of view to tell the story. Six POVs have the possibility to be very confusing for the reader, but Lippman does a great job of keeping the story moving. I’m not sure she could have told the story with fewer characters, since each POV (one of the Bethany girls, their mother, their father, the current detective, the original case detective, and a hospital case worker) has a distinct view of the original case and the events that have happened since then.
A woman claiming to be Heather Bethany, the younger of the two sisters, is involved in a traffic accident and spills the entire story to the first police officer on the scene. Is she really Heather Bethany? Or someone trying to divert attention to get out of the mess following the accident?
This is a fast moving novel and a quick read, despite its 350+ pages.
Blessings!
Nichole