Callie Hauser comes home to the New Jersey Pine Barrens as the new police chief, which in a town this size means everybody she polices knew her as a kid. She makes an arrest that looks routine and it kicks loose a case nobody has touched in thirty years: The Riley twins, sixteen, gone one day in the nineties with no trace and no answer. Mullen runs it in two timelines, the girls then and Callie now, and one of the voices comes at you in second person, which takes some getting used to and then gets under your skin. It’s slow on purpose. The Pine Barrens do a lot of the work — a million-plus acres of scrub pine and sand roads and stories, right in the middle of the most crowded state in the country.
Heather