Sunday, April 19, 2015

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today, by Stacy Juba (author), Erin Moon (narrator)

Audible, February 2013 (original publication 2009)

Kris Langley has returned to her home town of Fremont, Massachusetts, and taken a job as editorial assistant and obit writer for the local paper. Part of that job is writing the "Twenty-five Years Ago Today" column, and while compiling items for the column from the paper's microfilm archive, she stumbles on the story of an unsolved murder. Diana Ferguson, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress, never arrived home one night after work at Rossi's Bar, and was found dead in the woods near the local college a few days later.

Kris doesn't use the story, out of sympathy for the family, but she can't let go of it. She blames herself for the kidnapping and murder of her cousin when they were twelve, and solving Diana's murder feels like a chance to make amends. But as she digs into the mystery, she finds herself in conflict with her family, her boss, and the murdered woman's handsome nephew, Eric Soares.

Kris's difficult relationship with her family feels painfully real to me. There are times I want to smack her sister, or tell her it's time to stop worrying about whether her mother thinks she's worthy. The sparks that fly with Eric, both of conflict and of attraction, grabbed me right away. The mystery itself is nicely complex, with multiple plausible suspects, evidence the police overlooked for entirely believable human reasons, and a killer who is not at all obvious, but who is in plain sight, with evidence and motive the reader could pick up on, if thinking it all through carefully, significantly before all the pieces fall into place.

Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this audiobook from the author.

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