Unbreathed Memories

June 12, 2000
An engaging combination of domestic drama and murder mystery, Talley's second Hannah Ives mystery (after Sing It to Her Bones) centers on the plucky heroine's ability to see her family through a crisis. After Hannah's recent battle with breast cancer, her retired parents move back to Annapolis, Md., where Hannah, her husband and her older sister reside. The family seems peaceful until Georgina, Hannah's younger sister who lives in Baltimore, is accused of murdering her therapist, who had been treating her for a protracted bout of postpartum depression. To make matters worse, the childhood memories that Georgina claims caused her emotional problems threaten to tear the family apart. Hannah resolves to prove the memories false and, with the advice of a retired mystery writer (and a few pages from the therapist's appointment book), she sets out to find the real killer. Talley's Hannah is an indefatigable caretaker and an irresistible protagonist who does her amateur sleuthing in between helping her parents move and babysitting her sister's kids. Ultimately, however, the novel is more a heartfelt (and melodramatic) story of a family's healing than a suspenseful mystery.