Lies that Bind

December 1, 2014
In Barbieri’s lukewarm follow-up to 2013’s Once Upon a Lie, a vindictive former neighbor approaches Maeve Conlon after Maeve’s father’s funeral to tell her she has an older sister. Soon afterward, Maeve is attacked in her Farringville, N.Y., bakery, then she finds a severed finger in her freezer. As the police investigate, she discovers that her sister, Evelyn, was born with developmental challenges and placed in Mansfield, an institution later closed because of poor conditions and abuses. Maeve joins a support group for relatives of the “Mansfield missing,” a group of residents who disappeared, but when an elderly woman from the group is killed, she realizes her quest for her sister might put her in peril. Barbieri drops frequent, heavy-handed reminders that Maeve herself is more dangerous than she appears, and secondary characters like her best friend, her ex-husband, and her oily landlord remain one-dimensional. Still, Barbieri effectively highlights the struggles faced by families with disabled children during the 1960s. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Agency.

December 1, 2014
Maeve Conlon's life changes forever when a former neighbor reveals that she has a sister.Maeve (Once Upon a Lie, 2013) grew up in the Bronx as an only child. Her father's devotion to "Little Mavy. The most perfect girl in the world" sent Margie and Dolores Haggerty, who lived down the street with their verbally abusive, alcoholic parents, into fits of jealousy. But is it envy alone that prompts Dolores to tell Maeve at Jack Conlon's funeral: "You need to find...[y]our sister"? Gradually, over the course of weeks, Maeve extracts pitifully few details from the Haggertys: The child's name was Aibhlinn, and she was sent away because she was developmentally disabled. Maeve already has enough to cope with: a break-in at her bakery, The Comfort Zone; her assistant Jo's pregnancy; a raise in rent from her garlicky landlord, Sebastian DuClos; a promising new relationship with local cop Chris Larsson; a missing insurance check; and Christmas dinner with her ex-husband, Cal, and his new wife, Gabriela. But she can't let go of Aibhlinn. Convinced that her sister was sent to Mansfield, a residential placement shuttered years ago for gross negligence, Maeve joins a support group for relatives of "the Mansfield Missing," who disappeared when the facility closed. She grills Jimmy Moriarty, her late dad's closest friend. And she confronts Regina Hartwell, who worked at Mansfield when her sister would have been there. But for all her determination and persistence, what Maeve gets in return are dodges, hedges and, as she increasingly suspects, outright lies. Maeve's second outing matches all the reward of being a daughter and all the challenge of being a parent with the newfound wonder of becoming a sister.

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January 1, 2015
Soon after Jack Conlon dies, Maeve Conlon learns that the father who raised her so lovingly had kept a big secret. At his wake, a drunken former neighbor, who had bullied Maeve mercilessly in childhood, blurts out the existence of a sister Maeve never knew about. As if Maeve didn't have enough on her plate, she starts searching for her sibling. The divorced single mother of two teenage daughters, Maeve is running a successful bakery, the Comfort Zone; helping her assistant, Jo, during the last stages of pregnancy; and dealing with break-ins at the bakery, the discovery of a severed human finger, and a missing insurance check. When she learns that her unacknowledged older sister, Evelyn, was brain-damaged, Maeve looks into the Mansfield Missing, a dozen residents of a nearby institution who were lost in the chaos of the institution's closing decades earlier. The second in the series (after Once upon a Lie, 2013), this is a fast-moving, nicely plotted story, lightened by the food factor (but sans recipes), with Maeve, who bakes to relieve stress, notable for her persistence and fearlessness, to a fault.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)