Paper Ghosts: A Novel of Suspense

"Publishers Weekly got it right, the novel is artful and elegant and—as always with Heaberlin—the setting itself is a character. Like November Road , the story involves a road trip, but this one with a possible serial killer. A young woman, obsessed with finding who killed her sister more than a decade ago, thinks she’s identified the culprit, an ageing photographer who lives in a halfway house. She’s linked his photos to a string of missing girls. The rub is that the man suffers from dementia. Pretending to be his daughter, the woman takes him on a road trip to try to jog his memory about past crimes. Lyrical prose, characters with hidden agendas, and a non-stop undercurrent of tension make this a must read. Yes, and there are other recent great examples, such as Wendy Walker’s All is Not Forgotten . It’s a testament to the skill of writers who can take a somewhat familiar premise but add a fresh new twist and make it compelling and original. Often the stories focus on the protagonist’s memory, but Heaberlin ratchets up the tension by focusing on the secrets that may, or may not, be locked up in the antagonist’s head."