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A review by book_concierge
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
4.0
In a small Mississippi town, two young boys, one white and the other black, hide their friendship. When they are in high school a young girl goes missing after a date with one of the boys. Her disappearance is never solved, but the town assumes he killed her and they persecute him. Meanwhile the other boy moves away and goes to college. Now, years later, Silas has returned to Chabot as a police constable. Larry is still ostracized and tormented by the local teens. When another young girl goes missing, Larry is the immediate suspect.
This is a mystery novel with layers of psychological tension woven through. We have characters who are without a father figure, or who have a completely dysfunctional family life. Add to this the prejudices and assumptions of a small Southern town’s citizens and police force, and the media frenzy surrounding the unexplained disappearance of two vibrant young women, and you have a recipe for personal tragedy. Franklin does a good job of building tension, giving us clues as to what is really happening, and what happened all those years ago. I was a little confused about his skipping back and forth in time – some chapters deal with the boys’ childhood, some with the first disappearance, some with the present – but I thought Franklin did a good job with this device. It certainly kept me on my toes trying to figure out what really happened. I’m not sure I was totally satisfied with the ending, but I think it reflected reality. Such tragedies never end well.
This is a mystery novel with layers of psychological tension woven through. We have characters who are without a father figure, or who have a completely dysfunctional family life. Add to this the prejudices and assumptions of a small Southern town’s citizens and police force, and the media frenzy surrounding the unexplained disappearance of two vibrant young women, and you have a recipe for personal tragedy. Franklin does a good job of building tension, giving us clues as to what is really happening, and what happened all those years ago. I was a little confused about his skipping back and forth in time – some chapters deal with the boys’ childhood, some with the first disappearance, some with the present – but I thought Franklin did a good job with this device. It certainly kept me on my toes trying to figure out what really happened. I’m not sure I was totally satisfied with the ending, but I think it reflected reality. Such tragedies never end well.