Brooke has had a difficult home life, and lives with her drunken father, Paul, and her 14 year old half-brother, Bobby, whom she tries her best to ignore. Her mother, Connie, abandoned her and Paul when she was just 6 years old, only to return some 10 years later with a terminal cancer diagnosis and 10 year old Bobby, another man's child. Needless to say, Paul, Brooke and Bobby weren't a happy family.
Brooke is a bit of a party girl, and while she's trying to make a go of college and studying to be a nurse, she recently dropped out and is working at a nursing home with her loser friend, Torie Dent. She's also dating Mike Rakowski, a somewhat good looking, but very possessive bully, and her best friend is a successful straight arrow named Aaron Reardon, who has an ongoing but unrequited crush on her. A few bad decisions happen regarding drugs, the nursing home, Mike and his dealer, and Brooke finds herself really needing an escape, from her stifling hometown of Rocky Cove, MA, but also everyone around her. And so she does, wrecking her car in a snow storm and dropping off the face of the earth.
For Dr. Robert Kirby, formerly known as Bobby or "fecto" as in defecto to Brooke, things have changed dramatically and he is quite the success in his life. He is married to Stephanie, a beautiful woman and the love of his life, and he has a young teen son named Peter. He is a professor at Uniondale College and has just received the prestigious NEH grant for his work comparing civil engineering to the human body, beating out his rival. Things are great, until a young woman calling herself Lily Stillwater shows up at his door claiming to be Brooke's daughter. What???
This starts Robert down the path of trying to find out who this girl is, if she is for real, what really happened to Brooke, and the real reason Brooke left 25 years ago. As is often the case, what he discovers might have been better left undisturbed.
He starts off calling the police officer on the long cold case, but is soon punted to an FBI agent named Vivi Pallotta, who has some interesting theories on Brooke's disappearance and a now-dead local serial killer named Sam Erskine. He continues to follow the trail left by Lily, which leads him to Paul, his stepfather now riddled with dementia and living in the same nursing home where Brooke once worked. While he follows clues, he comes to find out that his marriage is crumbling and Stephanie takes Peter to go stay with her sister in Philadelphia. What's worse is that he receives a peculiar video that seems to set him up for blackmailing.
As he reconnects with people he hasn't thought about in decades, like Mike Rakowski and Aaron Reardon, he comes to realize that not everything is as it seems or at least, as he remembered. He is forced to face the fact that while he is now Dr. Robert Kirby, frightened and damaged little Bobby is still a big part of him, despite the years he spent in an institution, "fixing his brain." Facing the hard truth of what really happened leading up to Brooke's disappearance will mean remembering dark parts of his past that he'd rather forget.
The story is told by flipping between Then, December 1998 and the days leading up to Brooke's disappearance, and Now, the present, and we see things from either Brooke's perspective in the past or Robert's in the present. Joe Clifford knows how to write a compelling thriller, but he also weaves a strong story built on damaged family relationships and difficult pasts. He also doesn't shy away from the ugly underbelly of drugs and what they can lead some people to do. There's some icky stuff that happens in this book, including injury that happens to Robert's dog, and some other things that I don't want to spoil, so if you are easily triggered, this might not be the book for you. There's nothing super graphic, mind you, just some things that might upset sensitive readers. Just a warning.
Overall, this is an interpersonal and emotional drama filled with self-introspection and overcoming one's past for several characters, while others succumb to it. I have only read one of Joe Clifford's other books, the recent Say My Name, and I really enjoyed it, as I did this book. However, his books seem to be drama and family-driven wrapped in a heavy veneer of thriller. This is not a bad thing at all, but if you are looking for a straight-up thriller, look elsewhere. The ending is a bit ambiguous for some characters, but we do get closure on what really happened to Brooke that night, which was satisfying. Joe Clifford can definitely weave a tale set in a bleak wintry setting with finesse.
