Long Bright River by Liz Moore: 5/5.
"The first time I found my sister dead, she was sixteen."
Life has not been easy for Mickey and Kacey, two sisters who grew up in Philadelphia amid the opioid crisis which claimed the lives of many friends and family members, including their own mother. Now adults, the sisters' lives had taken very different turns: Mickey works as a police officer, patrolling the very neighborhood where her younger sister has fallen into addiction and often prowls the street as a sex worker, seeking money for her next fix. When a string of homicides occur targeting young women in the neighborhood at the same time Kacey disappears, Mickey risks her career, her family, and her life to find both the killer and her sister.
I'm usually not a fan of thrillers or crime fiction, but I flew through this book. While the plot revolves around a murder mystery and police work, this story is, at its heart, a family drama. The central relationship, and source of conflict, which drives the novel is between the estranged sisters Mickey and Kacey. While at first their dynamic seems black and white-a cop and a drug addict-throughout the story Moore successfully complicates that dynamic, in a way which compels the reader to question not only the perceived morality of both, but of their own assumptions about the motivations and judgment of each character.
This is a book which achieves the difficult task of illustrating the somewhat trite idea that "there is good and bad in everyone," without coming off as didactic or sacrificing a satisfying narrative (I truly did not see the ending of the whodunit coming). It's at once a stunning portrait of a community in the midst of a crisis, a family struggling to remain connected after various losses and betrayals, and a mystery which will keep you eagerly reading until the very last pages. Five well-deserved stars to Liz Moore for this stunning novel.
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