Where

March 23, 2015
When everyone disappears from Davy’s small coastal town of Kraventown, S.C., he’s sure it’s the fault of a newcomer, slick Northerner Rawson Steele. The truth is harder to determine in this multiperspective mystery. Reed (Son of Destruction) plays off various unexplained disappearances from Jamestown to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, showing the terror of both those who vanished and those who wonder where they went. Davy’s girlfriend, Merrill, narrates from the side of the disappeared, and the story is mostly driven by her relationships with the other characters. The complexities of her pre-disappearance life (issues with Davy; Rawson’s own strange advances; dealing with her abusive, power-hungry father) still haunt her even as she’s trapped in a sterile, stupor-inducing new world. There’s a powerful sense of building terror and hopelessness, and the portrayal of Merrill’s father works much like a smoldering volcano. The conclusion is extremely abrupt and ambiguous, but the brilliant writing and characterization make even the faltering ending worth getting to.

March 1, 2015
A paranormal mystery about what happens when a whole town goes missing. Davy Ribault and Merrill Poulnot have had a fight, a bad one. Which would be fine if Davy hadn't left so early in the morning without leaving a note-and if the entire population of Kraven Island hadn't vanished from their homes while he was gone. Now Davy is left trying to figure out what happened-and whether Rawson Steele, the handsome "big-city stranger" who recently swooped into town, has anything to do with it. Meanwhile, Merrill, her vulnerable brother, Ned, her domineering father, and just about everyone else in their town have been transported to a mysterious, featureless desert town that could be anywhere, or nowhere. Reed's (Son of Destruction, 2014, etc.) premise has plenty of eerie promise, and her decision to show both sides of this missing persons mystery adds an unsettling new dimension to the tale. But mysteries need clues to keep readers going, and Reed waits far too long to let her characters learn anything about what's happened. Davy at least tries to figure things out; the missing townspeople spend most of the book just thinking about taking action. There's real, raw emotion here, centered around the experience of having a loved one go missing, the idea that "the one you lost and never find lives on forever." The problem is the plot, which leaves its characters with plenty to want but not much to do about it. An intriguing, but ultimately underdeveloped, premise that doesn't pay off.

April 15, 2015

The residents of Kraven, a small Carolina coastal island, all disappear one early morning, removed somehow from their houses and placed in all-white facsimiles of their homes. Not on Kraven when the incident happened, Dave Ribault is desperate to find his lover Merrill. He sneaks back to the island, finding only empty houses and no sign of the missing residents. Dave and Merrill had fought before she vanished; Dave was jealous of newcomer Rawston Steele, a Northerner cozying up to the locals for opaque reasons that might be at the root of the mysterious event. VERDICT The obvious read-alike for the latest work from Reed (Enclave; Son of Destruction) is Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, although it adds the perspective of the taken as well as the left behind. This slim, barely sf tale is probably more likely to appeal to literary fiction fans, focusing as it does on the interior life of its characters and keeping the phenomena at the heart of the story frustratingly mysterious and off the page.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.