How far should a small town go to maintain its quiet life, a life that believes in good, solid, family values? That is the question that Erica Spindler addresses in her novel IN SILENCE.
Avery Chauvin has left her hometown of Cypress Springs, Louisiana to become an award winning journalist in Washington. Her father’s death finds her back in her family home, devastated and full of questions. The official cause of death has been deemed suicide, but Avery’s father had been a respected, dedicated physician and not someone who would take his own life. Public opinion feels that his grief over his wife’s death was more than he could bear.
As she starts to clean out her parents’ home, she finds a box of newspaper clippings that covered a fifteen-year-old murder. Questioning old friends brings only more questions and she becomes aware of an unusual amount of recent suicides and odd accidents. Then a woman who has come to town hunting her missing brother vanishes and another is found brutally murdered. It seems as if the past and the present are colliding in the perfect little town.
IN SILENCE is my second Erica Spindler book and there were enough similarities to the first one that I thought that I was ahead of the plot. I was and I wasn’t. There were enough secrets in Cypress Springs to surprise me and keep me reading.
There are also some fairly graphic scenes that caused me to wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the grotesque of women authors vs. male authors. Erica Spindler should be included in such a study. Her murders can be exceptionally brutal, but there seems to be a softer touch in the telling of them.
This is an author that I will continue to read.
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