Very good; standalone.
Strong writing and plotting, suspenseful, well drawn female protagonist (1/2 star deduction for repetition in middle); bought after reading it.

2018 Anthony Award: Best Paperback Original ( )

There are some continuity issues, which make me crazy. While I have sympathy for Anna, some of her actions seemed contrived and illogical. ( )

Real Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Anna Winger knows people better than they know themselves with only a glance—at their handwriting. Hired by companies seeking trustworthy employees and by the lovelorn hoping to find happiness, Anna likes to keep the real mess of other people’s lives at arm’s length and on paper. But when she is called to use her expertise on a ransom note left behind at a murder scene in the small town she and her son have recently moved to, the crime inevitably gets under Anna’s skin. Was the child kidnapped from his home by his own mother, trying to save him from his abusive father? Thirteen years ago, Anna did the same thing for her unborn son, now a troubled teen rebelling against the protected life she’s given him.

The local sheriff wants no part of Anna’s brand of hocus pocus, but he’ll do whatever it takes to bring his community and his office back under control. Anna is able to discern from the note that no one in the little boy’s family has been safe for a long time. And bringing him and his mother home could be the worst possible outcome for them.

A GIFT FROM A "FRIEND" WHOSE BIBLIOHOLISM RIVALS MY OWN. *FIST-SHAKE*

My Review: Domestic thrillers aren't always bad. This one is of the un-bad ilk. Anna's life hasn't been easy, or peaceful; it's been marred by violence from every man in it. Of course she has a son. But she's raised him in such a way that he's clear that interpersonal violence isn't an option.

So he runs away from her to find out why she's so het-up about this.

What happens, then, is an extended hunt for and unearthing of Anna's many wounds from source to cessation. Why I recommend it is Author Rader-Day's facility with characterization. I'm less enamored of her exposition and dialogue.

I turned in a slow circle, taking in the empty room. Something wasn't right. What was it? And then I saw. His backpack was missing from the table. "His backpack."

"What?"

"I don't know," I said. A shrill alarm began to ring in my ears, and I raised my voice to be heard over it. "I don't know."

"OK," Joe said. "Let's be calm. What about his backpack?"

"It's not on the table. It's always, always on the table." I thought of the pack's dense bulk, the thump it made when he set it down.

Now, let me be clear: This isn't bad writing. It's, um, uninspired, uninspiring writing IMO, but definitely not bad...the "pack" syllable repeated as often as it is, plosive and glottal and easy to hear, just works better as audio than visual. There is quite a bit of the writing that works as an ear-read or as film dialogue but not as visualization aid. It leaves me, the reader-as-cranial-filmmaker, without any room to decide things for myself. That's not my preference in reading. Hence my less-than-half-star over the base 3. Which, remember!, means "good!" ( )

Meh. Great start followed by meandering plot with wishing washy heroine and some implausable twists at the end. Not a book I would totally recommend but just an ok read. ( )

Anna Winger is a handwriting expert and single mother who's been moving from place to place with her son in an effort to escape her past and barely making ends meet. As the novel starts, she's given a job helping to find a missing boy believed to have been kidnapped by his mother. This case leads to far deeper matters than it seems at first and results in her being forced to finally confront her past, both her childhood and her marriage, and possibly have a chance of salvaging her present and future.

As this really isn't a genre I read much of, it took a while for me to get into the book. Part of this was simply due to the way handwriting analysis is treated and how skilled Anna is at it; I strongly doubt that it's possible to reliably tell anything about someone's personality from how they write (as opposed to, say, their emotional state when they wrote a specific sample), and I'm positive that it isn't possible from a single letter (in the case in the book, a capital D). However, this matter faded into the background as the story progressed, beyond being a reason people who know of her skill tend to be cautious around her.

The later part of the story seems to rely on a surprising amount of coincidence, but most of them are either explained away by the details of what's going on or at least don't seem anywhere near as unlikely as they did at first. (As an example of the latter category, Anna happening to see something at a rest stop seems like an unbelievably unlikely occurrence when it first happens, but the explanation of events means that what Anna saw was more likely to be somewhere along that highway.)

While it takes about half of the book to reveal just what Anna is constantly running from, there are enough hints that it's not really a surprise. It also helps to explain why she frequently seems to try to burn bridges almost as soon as there's any sign one might be built. The ending also makes it seem that she's finally recovering. The book also manages to avoid making a couple of characters into cardboard villains; one appears to have reformed over the years and the other plays a critical role in rescuing someone (although neither is absolved of their early actions or treated as if they should be).

(I received a copy of this from the publisher. I have no idea why they sent it to me, but felt it best to note that they did.) ( )