My bookshelf·Index No. 0207

Night Flowers

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In 1983, hikers in the Gila National Forest find a woman and two children in barrels. Thirty years later nobody has a name for any of them. Laura MacDonald, a librarian and genealogist in Connecticut going through breast cancer treatment, takes up the case as something to hold onto, and works it with Jean Martinez, a Sierra County detective whose family wants her retired. The third voice is the dead woman herself, telling it from the afterlife and afraid that if the killer is caught she’ll be remembered only for how she died. Herchenroether is a breast cancer survivor and that half of the book is as sharp as the mystery.

Night Flowers
By Sara Herchenroether. Tin House, 2023. 320 pages.