In Bitter Chill
Summary: The deepest secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves in this richly atmospheric, compellingly written, and expertly constructed crime debut from an emerging talent.
Derbyshire, 1978: a small town in the idyllic English countryside is traumatized by the kidnapping of two young schoolgirls, Rachel Jones and Sophie Jenkins. Within hours, Rachel is found wandering alone near the roadside, unharmed yet unable to remember anything, except that her abductor was a woman. No trace of Sophie is ever discovered.
Present day: over thirty years later, Sophie’s mother commits suicide. Detective inspector Francis Sadler and detective constable Connie Childs are assigned to look at the kidnapping again to see if modern police methods can discover something that the original team missed. Rachel, with the help of her formidable mother and grandmother, recovered from the kidnapping and has become a family genealogist. She wants nothing more than to continue living quietly beneath the radar, but the discovery of the strangled body of one of her former teachers days after the suicide brings the national media back to her doorstep. Desperate to stop a modern killer from striking again, Rachel and the police must unpick the clues to uncover what really happened all those years ago as the past threatens to engulf the present.from https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781466878082
Group Reviews/Comments:
9 thumbs up
4 thumbs down
Most of our group enjoyed this quick read. Likeable protagonist, interesting pacing and decent plot. No thrills or chills, but a typical English mystery.”
Although there were some first-time author pitfalls (a bit too much of “telling rather than showing”) by and large the group found this beginning effort impressive.
Readers commented on how sad the story was, and how it was refreshing to read something that reflected real life, rather than some “whacked out serial killer.”
One group member commented that it didn’t really matter if you figured out the mystery early because it was more important to see the characters figure it out. You cared about them and their journey of discovery.
Other comments were about a great sense of time and place and that the police procedural part was well done.
In keeping with our group’s history of polar opposite opinions, those who didn’t like the book commented that the story wasn’t anything like real life, but rather a complex soap opera with a story so insane you just stopped caring. There were also strong criticisms of the trope of an amateur detective going into a dangerous situation alone and needing rescue.
The thumbs down critics found the book slow moving—one reader claimed she fell asleep reading it (!) and the characters were stock characters that gave the reader little to care about.
