Title: LONG BRIGHT RIVER
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
"I could picture the drug as the Piper [of Hamelin]. I
picture the trance it casts: I can see this trance quite clearly every day that
I work, everyone walked around, charmed, enthralled, beguiled. I imagine the
town of Hamelin after the story ends. [...] I can hear it: the terrible silence
of the town."
Book Description:
Mickey Fitzpatrick has been patrolling the 24th District for
years. She knows most of the working women by name. She knows what desperation
looks like and what people will do when they need a fix. She’s become used to
finding overdose victims: their numbers are growing every year. But every time
she sees someone sprawled out, slumped over, cold to the touch, she has to pray
it’s not her sister, Kacey.
When the bodies of murdered sex workers start turning up on
the Ave, the Chief of Police is keen to bury the news. They’re not the kind of
victims that generate a whole lot of press anyway. But Mickey is obsessed,
dangerously so, with finding the perpetrator - before Kacey becomes the next
victim.
What attracted me to this book:
I hemmed and hawed a lot whether I should pick up this book
or not. I see the consequences of addiction and the long lasting effects on
both the victims as well as their families at work, and it’s not pretty.
Reading is an escape for me, and I wasn’t sure whether a hard hitting book
about drugs would be for me. I even started reading it last month and put it
aside again. But now that I have sat down and read it, I am so glad that I did!
My musings:
Kensington, Philadelphia, is about as far removed from my
reality as it gets, but with an author as talented as Liz Moore that was no
hindrance at all. It wasn’t long until she had transported me into the dark
alleys of the city, where people die from drug overdoses on a daily basis,
where women sell their bodies for money for their next fix and where babies are
born already in withdrawal. It’s a scary world, but handled with such
compassion and care that the great human tragedy of the opioid crisis was
brought very close to my heart without any political agenda or judgment of the
people involved.
Mickey is a policewoman who is very familiar with the
terrible cost of the opioid crisis on human lives. Having grown up in
Kensington, the daily confrontation with the effects of drug addiction are an
everyday occurrence to her. But Micky has an Achilles heel – her own sister Kacey
is one of the victims of the drug, and she has been missing for weeks. Every
time Mickey finds the body of yet another woman on the streets, she is
expecting it to be Kacey, and it emotionally breaks her.
I felt so sad for Mickey. Having lost her mother to a drug
overdose when the girls were only small, Mickey and Kacey were sent to live
with their grandmother, who didn’t bother to hide her resentment of having to
look after two young children. I never quite understood why she was so horrible
to those two little girls – she professed to be heartbroken over losing her
daughter, and yet she seems to hate her granddaughters! Whilst Mickey is
determined to make something of her life, her sister falls into the same trap
as their mother did and becomes an addict. I can never fully understand what it
would be like to grow up with such tragedy, and in such a scary and tragic neighbourhood.
Here every family seems to have lost a child, a parent or a sibling to
addiction, but the author portrays her characters so vividly that I found I
could easily relate to their plight.
Part police procedural, part family drama, the story soon
pulled me in with all its complexities and the mystery surrounding Kacey’s
disappearance. Whilst I would not primarily call it a mystery, there are a lot
of elements that define that genre, and a twist I did not see coming. I loved
the way the author portrayed the relationship between the sisters, which
ultimately drove the story for me.
Summary:
LONG BRIGHT RIVER was a powerful, hard-hitting and
gut-wrenching story that was handled with such insight, sensitivity and
compassion for the victims and families affected that it was impossible not to
be touched deeply by it. It’s not a happy read, and sometimes it felt like a
heavy weight on my heart to pick it back up and keep reading, and yet I could
not put it down. If you are finding it off to a bit of a slow start, stick with
it, because it was worth it!
Thank
you to Netgalley and Penguin Random House UK for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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