Follow Me Down

November 28, 2016
At the start of Smith’s compelling first novel, John Pruden, the police chief of Wayoata, N.Dak., phones Mia Hass, a Chicago-based pharmacist with a dependence on pills, to ask whether she’s heard recently from her twin brother, Lucas. Pruden, who says he’s missing, urges Mia to return to Wayoata, her hometown, where she learns that Lucas, a high school teacher, has become the prime suspect in the murder of one of his students. The town residents are all against him, and the inept local police are all too willing to treat the faintest circumstantial evidence as if it were solid proof in what they consider an open-and-shut case. Only Mia is sure of her brother’s innocence. To discover what really happened, she must descend into the narrow-minded hypocrisy of the small town she hoped to leave behind her and come to grips with her problematic relationship with her alcoholic, brain-damaged mother. When we think things cannot get worse, they do. Against all odds, Mia fiercely pursues the truth in this unsettling crime thriller. Agent: Beth Phelan, Bent Agency.

February 1, 2017
In Smith's debut thriller, Mia Haas returns to North Dakota when she learns that her twin brother is wanted by the police for murdering one of his female students. Mia's life as a pharmacist in Chicago is not without its stresses, but it's nothing like being back in her hometown, where she is haunted by a mentally unstable mother now institutionalized after an accident, a father she never knew, and a police department she has long distrusted. Her current demons are the pills she's stolen from work and keeps in a secret bag at the bottom of her purse. As Mia tries to prove her brother's innocence, she must learn about the victima popular teen with an overbearing dance mom and a drug-dealing, dropout boyfriend. Some of her information comes from the same guidance counselor Mia had a crush on when she was a student. Though the hidden relationships between some of the characters are revealed a little too perfunctorily in the book's last chapters, this fast-moving domestic thriller will satisfy readers of contemporary suspense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)