Gone Too Long

Seven years after ten-year-old Beth vanishes from her Georgia home, Imogene Coulter is burying the Klan leader father she has tried to deny. On the day of the funeral, she finds a child locked in the basement of his hideout, a discovery that links her to the long-gone Beth. From a two-time Edgar Award winner.

April 8, 2019
In this gripping, gut-wrenching thriller from Edgar-winner Roy (The Disappearing), a member of the local Ku Klux Klan in Simmonsville, Ga., kidnaps 10-year-old Beth, the daughter of a single mother, in a bungled attempt to scare Beth’s Puerto Rican babysitter and the babysitter’s family into leaving the area. Unwilling to kill Beth, her captor holds her prisoner in the basement of an outbuilding on a remote property used for Klan business. Seven years later, in 2017, Imogene Coulter, a foe of the Klan who’s descended from a prominent Klansman, by chance discovers the basement, where she finds a boy, Christopher, who has been held there since infancy with Beth, and takes him home. Shortly before, Beth had escaped and is in hiding. The tension rises as Beth tries to survive and Imogene fights to safeguard Christopher (and herself) from his captors. Vividly told though somewhat implausibly plotted, Roy’s tragic cautionary tale demonstrates what can happen when decent people allow themselves to be bullied into turning a blind eye while others do their worst, including murder. Greg Iles’s fans will find a lot to like. Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency.

April 15, 2019
White supremacy and family secrets fuel the latest Southern gothic thriller by a two-time Edgar Award-winning author. Imogene Coulter has spent most of her life in Simmonsville, Georgia, a small town named for her mother's family--a family known for its connection to the Ku Klux Klan. Imogene's great-great-grandfather helped to revive the Klan in 1915. Edison Coulter--the man Imogene calls Daddy--led the Knights of the Southern Georgia Order. Her brother, Eddie, her sister, Jo Lynne, and Jo Lynne's husband, Garland, are active members. Imogene has tried to distance herself from this legacy, and, for her mother's sake, she has tried to make peace with the full breadth and depth of her family's cruelty and corruption. Then Edison dies and Imogene finds a small child living in a boarded-up house on the family's farm. As she struggles to find the identity of this child, she uncovers a host of other crimes. The closer she gets to the truth, the harder she has to fight to protect herself and everyone she loves against competing factions within the Klan. Imogene finally discovers that her terrible heritage is something she must fight against rather than repress. Roy (The Disappearing, 2018, etc.) takes her time weaving in backstory and letting her characters reveal themselves, and thriller fans who read for plot might get a bit impatient. But those who settle in will be rewarded with a riveting mystery, brilliantly crafted and weighted with real-world resonance. The fact that hate groups are resurgent in the United States emerges as an essential element of this novel. The narrative is interspersed with brief historical notes beginning with the origins of the KKK--and ending with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. A timely thriller that will stay with the reader long after the last page has been turned.

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Starred review from May 1, 2019
After her father's funeral, Imogene's curiosity defeats caution, and she goes looking for evidence of his sins in the abandoned house that he used as a hideaway. Behind the locked basement door, Imogene discovers a secret that blows away her suspicions of illicit mistresses and Klan meetings: a young boy is cowered beneath the stairs. His mother, he says, went with the man a long time ago and hasn't come back. As Imogene settles the child in her old bedroom, the house she pulled him from burns to the ground, along with any evidence of his captor. But Imogene knows that the basement prison is connected to the Klan; her father was the famed leader of the Knights of the Southern Georgia Order, followed loyally by her siblings and half of their town. Imogene is finished with letting them keep their secrets, and she confronts Klan enforcers and her family's ugly history to reveal the tragic story of a lost girl and her son. The space behind Roy's sensual descriptions of rural Georgia and Imogene's final, fierce defiance of her father's legacy is filled with a creeping, entangling sense of danger. It's the kind of writing you would expect from the Edgar-winning author, but it's made even more powerful here, filled with the purpose of exposing a hateful legacy and issuing a timely warning of its historical ebb and flow.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)