Walking the Bones

Starred review from November 6, 2017
Silvis’s deeply satisfying sequel to 2017’s Two Days Gone finds Sgt. Ryan DeMarco of the Pennsylvania State Police reeling from events of the recent past: the death of his best friend in action, his baby son’s death, and the end of his marriage. On a visit to the hometown of his sweetheart, Trooper Jayne Matson, the pair are pulled by a trio of elderly vigilantes into an unofficial investigation into the deaths of seven young black women, whose skeletons were discovered behind a false wall in a local church several years earlier. Filled with the psychological language of memory and dreams, this solid procedural offers heart-pounding moments of suspense. Childhood history and relationship drama keep the lead’s personal life as interesting as the case he is chasing. Silvis smoothly blends moments of exquisite beauty into a sea of darker emotion to create a moving story heavy with the theme of the “past is never past.” Agent: Sandy Lu, L. Perkins Agency.

November 1, 2017
Will Sgt. Ryan DeMarco, already so traumatized in his first recorded case (Two Days Gone, 2017), ever fully rejoin the human race? Seven dead girls do their best to pull him back in.Still haunted by the death of his friend professor Thomas Huston and his own troubled family history, DeMarco's at the point of announcing his retirement from the Pennsylvania State Police when his lover, Trooper Jayme Matson, and his supervisor, Cmdr. Kyle Bowen, scheme to get him to take a temporary leave instead. Now that he's got nothing to do but wrestle demons, from his estranged wife to their baby son, who was killed in a car accident, it seems as if it might be positively therapeutic for him to look into a case that swims into his ken during a visit to Jayme's family in Aberdeen, Kentucky: the discovery four years ago of the skeletonized corpses of seven young women immured in a wall in the First Baptist Church. The victims, all African-American teenagers, had gone missing between 1998 and 2004. The local police had long given up the case, and the gruesome discovery provided no new leads they could follow. But a group of three elderly citizens calling themselves the Da Vinci Cave Irregulars think DeMarco and Jayme are just the people to solve a case that weighs as heavily on the town as DeMarco's memories do on him. Although DeMarco quickly identifies four leading suspects--First Baptist pastor Eli Royce, former church caretaker Chad McGintey, Chad's missing successor, Virgil Helm, and pedophile ex-teacher Aaron Henry--the investigation proceeds at a glacial pace. For every two steps forward, DeMarco takes three more steps back into his childhood abuse by his father and his continued mourning for his son. And no matter how keen his interest in the case becomes, it remains overshadowed by his fear: "I'm becoming my father."Further evidence, if any was needed, that all the author's heroes are direct descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Silvis' own fictionalizations of (Disquiet Heart, 2002, etc.) successfully dramatized without exorcising.

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November 1, 2017
This is one of those novels that teaches us stufflike what a chupacabra is and the meaning of the Portuguese word sentipensanteand the knowledge comes in a gush of gorgeous prose. Add a genre delight: offbeat characters, like the retired coroner, the former university prof, and the part-time psychicthey call themselves the DaVinci Cave Irregularswho lure two cops into investigating the unsolved murder of seven girls. One's reaction to these cops will depend on one's patience for the sort of cops and PIs we're seeing a lot of now: people with screwed-up lives who won't stop dwelling on them. Sergeant Ryan DeMarco spends Sundays sitting beside his son's grave. His partner, Jayme, broods at length on her distress when her best friend in high school committed suicide. These character-building asides detract a bit from a story that could use a little more meat on its bones, but, in the end, the beautiful writing and nicely worked scenes provide satisfactory compensation. Readers should be warned: one of DeMarco's introspective scenes recalls the killing of his puppy, described in painful detail.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)