Sunday, March 29, 2020

Book 22: Long Bright River by Liz Moore

A book club book! Which I did not in fact manage to read in time for the actual book club meeting, but in my own defense it was scheduled as a zoom meeting for the end of March and I was not yet at a point where that was something I was remotely capable of doing. Boy, what a time.

Anyway! The book. This is an extremely well done modern crime novel, about a woman who grew up in Kensington, a very rough neighborhood of Philadelphia, and became a cop and walked the streets of her old neighborhood. Her sister was also lost to those streets a long time ago, and now there's a killer out there targeting drug users and women who are sex workers in order to buy drugs. She feels the need now to go beyond the department in order to attempt to both find her sister and protect others like her.

The protagonist is a cop, but the cops are not the good guys--in a lot of ways that's one of the only things about this book that made it tolerable to read in 2020, even before George Floyd's death. The narrative is extremely well-told, with an unreliable narrator that makes the reveals both land extremely hard and was stressful to deal with in lol March. It's not exactly my kind of book, but if you are looking for a modern crime novel that focuses on women, I would recommend it.

Grade: B

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