Title: It All Falls Down
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟1/2
Book Description:
Growing up, Nora Watts only knew one parent—her father. When
he killed himself, she denied her grief and carried on with her life. Then a
chance encounter with a veteran who knew him raises disturbing questions Nora
can’t ignore—and dark emotions she can’t control. To make her peace with the
past, she has to confront it.
Finding the truth about her father’s life and his violent death takes her from Vancouver to Detroit where Sam Watts grew up, far away from his people and the place of his birth. Thanks to a disastrous government policy starting in the 1950s, thousands of Canadian native children like Sam were adopted by American families. In the Motor City, Nora discovers that the circumstances surrounding Sam’s suicide are more unsettling than she’d imagined.
Yet no matter how far away Nora gets from Vancouver, she can’t shake trouble. Back in the Pacific Northwest, former police detective turned private investigator Jon Brazuca is looking into the overdose death of a billionaire’s mistress. His search uncovers a ruthless opiate ring and a startling connection to Nora, the infuriatingly distant woman he’d once tried to befriend. He has no way to warn or protect her, because she’s become a ghost, vanishing completely off the grid.
Focused on the mysterious events of her father’s past and the clues they provide to her own fractured identity and that of her estranged daughter, Nora may not be able to see the danger heading her way until it’s too late. But it’s not her father’s old ties that could get her killed—it’s her own.
Finding the truth about her father’s life and his violent death takes her from Vancouver to Detroit where Sam Watts grew up, far away from his people and the place of his birth. Thanks to a disastrous government policy starting in the 1950s, thousands of Canadian native children like Sam were adopted by American families. In the Motor City, Nora discovers that the circumstances surrounding Sam’s suicide are more unsettling than she’d imagined.
Yet no matter how far away Nora gets from Vancouver, she can’t shake trouble. Back in the Pacific Northwest, former police detective turned private investigator Jon Brazuca is looking into the overdose death of a billionaire’s mistress. His search uncovers a ruthless opiate ring and a startling connection to Nora, the infuriatingly distant woman he’d once tried to befriend. He has no way to warn or protect her, because she’s become a ghost, vanishing completely off the grid.
Focused on the mysterious events of her father’s past and the clues they provide to her own fractured identity and that of her estranged daughter, Nora may not be able to see the danger heading her way until it’s too late. But it’s not her father’s old ties that could get her killed—it’s her own.
My musings:
Nora Watts, the character Sheena Kamal created in her novel
Eyes Like Mine (also Published under The Lost Ones), was one of my favourite
protagonists of 2017 and I was really looking forward to meeting up with her
again.
It is a very different Nora we see in Shamal’s latest novel
It All Falls Down. After killing someone in order to rescue her daughter, Nora
struggles not only with her conscience but has also lost the gift that had set
her apart as an investigator – her ability to detect lies. She is now living
with her friend and former boss Sebastian Crow, who is dying from cancer and
trying to compile his memoirs with Nora’s help. She seems even more rootless
and lost without her job as investigator, her dark past still haunting her.
Already a very solitary and reserved character, she is becoming even more
anti-social, if this is at all possible. So when the past catches up with her
in the form of an old military buddy of her father’s, she grabs the opportunity
to travel to Detroit, her father’s childhood home, to try and find out more
about her parents’ past. As the daughter of an indigenous Canadian man who had
been taken from his birth family and raised by adoptive parents, and a
Palestinian refugee mother, who vanished without a trace when Nora was a child,
she has many questions about her lineage that she thought would never be
answered. She is especially haunted by the suicide of her father, which saw her
sister and her being put into foster care and raised as a ward of the state.
The dark underbelly of Detroit offers a sinister backdrop to
Nora’s search for truth, and a stark contrast to her Vancouver home. For a
reader from a small remote country town, this setting was a huge eye-opener to
me. With an industrial crisis hanging over the city, bringing high
unemployment, drugs, violence, hopelessness and crime, Detroit seemed like a scary
and joyless place to me. As soon as Nora starts digging into her father’s past,
threatening to unearth some skeletons, she is attracting the attention of some
very dangerous people, which sees her having to go on the run and fight for her
life.
I was happy to see that Nora, despite her lost superpower,
was still the brash, abrasive, badass character I had been so enamoured with in
Kama’s first book. She also hasn’t lost her self-deprecating humour I had
enjoyed so much. Whilst Nora does her best to keep everyone at arms’ length,
including her readers, she is an irresistible protagonist. However, I felt that
there was a link missing between Kamal’s first novel and this one, as the story
makes a huge jump forward in time to a point where I felt that I had perhaps
missed another book. Nora’s and Brazuca’s stories don’t tie together well in
this one, and it all felt slightly disjointed to me. I also felt it more
difficult to connect to the element of organised crime and gangland activity,
which was so alien to me and did not have the same emotional pull as Nora’s
first quest, of rescuing a child she had given up for adoption at birth.
However, as Nora discovers some pieces of her parents’ past that put everything
she has ever thought into doubt, I felt myself getting more intrigued.
Whilst I felt it a bit harder to connect to all the
different characters in It All Falls Down than in Eyes Like Mine, and
desperately missed Nora’s faithful companion Whisper, I still enjoyed this plucky character and look forward to finding
out more about her in the next book in the series. As a fair warning to
readers, I feel that this book would not work well as a stand-alone novel and
highly recommend reading the first book in the series before delving into this
storyline.
Thank
you to Edelweiss and William Morrow for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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