Kat Rosenfield's suspenseful first novel looks at the psychological effects of a stranger's death on Becca, a small-town 18-year-old bound "for a high-powered life in a city far away."
With graduation behind her, Becca is headed for college at summer's end. Her plan is on track until her boyfriend dumps her the night of her graduation, and a dead girl is found on the side of the road just outside of town on County Road 128, a route that veers off to the Appalachians. Becca is so shaken that her future is derailed just hours after she's accepted her diploma and waved the crowd goodbye.
The discovery of the body, beaten and left lying in a pool of blood, with a man's shoe print beside it, leaves Becca stunned and reeling, unable to reconcile the easy world she thought she knew with this new, ugly one filled with suspicion and doubt. Rosenfield alternates scenes of how Amelia Anne ended up dead with Becca's first-person recollections of that summer. The tension rises as each vignette closes, propelling us headlong into a flash of violence and hate as the two stories come together at the finish.
Readers will revel in Kat Rosenfield's description of small-town life. She captures the essence of what it's like to know everyone in town but not know anything about who they really are--their secrets, their fears, their desires. --René Kirkpatrick, blogger and bookseller at Mockingbird Books