Samantha Newsom is leaving her shift as a nurse to help assist in the suicide of her terminally ill uncle Gil at the beginning of this story. It’s quite a tone to set immediately. The next morning, Sam gets a call that her uncle has died (duh), but nobody suspects any foul play. Hot take – you should be allowed to decide when you and how you die if you’re terminally ill. But that’s a topic for another time.
Sam heads back out to Gil’s house to start the process of cleaning up his stuff and getting his house ready to sell. She gets a knock on the door and thinks it’s the police coming to arrest her for helping her uncle pass away peacefully. It’s so not though. The state police investigator is looking back into the case of her parents, uncle, and little sister’s murder two decades prior. Sam happened to be at a friend’s house for a sleepover that night, so she was the lone survivor.
There’s a lot of emotion (again duh) because everyone believes that cops killed her family and then covered up the crime. Oh the house was also burned to the ground. Sam spends the next week in her hometown trying to figure out what the hell happened. She reunites with old “friends” and “family” (most of them are assholes) and stirs up lots of trouble along the way. You can tell that Sam is still hurting and kinda reckless, because she doesn’t seem to have a healthy sense of self-preservation throughout her investigation.
Sam nearly gets killed a few times, but she just keeps pushing through to find out the truth. I really liked how this book ended though. Sam realized that she was super messed up and checked herself into an in-patient mental health facility. I feel like lots of other books would be like “she solved the mystery, and now everything is fine”, but not this one. She figured out what happened to her family, but she was still so messed up from the initial crime and the intervening years that she decided to do something about it. I say bravo.
