The first in a series featuring Dara Burke, a young woman growing up in Appalachia who discovers she can commune with the dead. And the dead often ask her to figure out who killed them. I received the second book as an ARC so decided to read the first book as the same characters cross over and Dara gets considerably older. ( )

If you loved the 60’s and are looking for a murder mystery that keeps you guessing, this one is for you! Dara is a baseball fan and quite the tomboy. She’s best friends with a boy named Fran, has a little brother named Alvey who she’s quite protective of, and may have a bit of paranormal ability. Half the story is from her POV. There’s a bit of amateur sleuthing in there… and a lot of being a kid in the 60’s and baseball. Dara LOVES her baseball.

Stan is our other POV character and he is working to solve the mystery of what’s going on with some murders going on around Baltimore. The half of the novel from Stan’s POV was well written and a good procedural, focused on the cases of young boys who have fallen prey to a serial killer. In the sections that focus on Stan, author Daryl Anderson demonstrates that she knows her stuff, taking us through interesting discussions of poisons, motives, and police procedure.

There were large sections where the story slowed because of extraneous detail. On the one hand, I loved how this period work gave us such a lovely flash back to the 60’s. But at times it did feel as if the story paused for so long to describe every era-appropriate food, TV show or event that the plotting got lost. There were several plot threads that were raised at points throughout the novel that got dropped. Dara’s paranormal abilities are raised at the beginning of the novel… and then that plot thread disappears.

The bigger problem, however, for me, is including the graphic on page sexual assault of a child near the end of the book when it was not critical to the plot and then not including any reaction or follow up. Had a sexual assault of a 12-year-old from the child’s POV been an important part of the plot, something that the child reacts to, something that shapes them emotionally, something that has consequences later… then I could have understood the scene. As written, it happens. Dara declares Gary is “a bad man.” And then for the rest of the book it’s as if it never happened at all. The show goes on! This feels harmful in terms of how sexual assault should be talked about and written and poorly affected my opinion of the book in the last 15% of it.

Trigger Warnings: Graphic sexual assault of a child ( )