A fingerprint analyst in northern Maine, Shaw Connolly is barely holding her life together. Her husband has moved out of the home she shares with their two sons and Shaw’s aging father. Shaw excels at her job, but hasn’t moved up the career ladder because she’s paralyzed by her past. In Edgar Award-winner Gillian French’s riveting adult debut, Shaw Connolly Lives to Tell, the disappearance of Shaw’s younger sister, Thea, when they were both teenagers, has defined—and suffocated—her life for the last 16 years.
Shaw’s obsession ratchets up as a man named Anders Janson begins taunting Shaw again with unsettling phone calls about Thea’s death, after a hiatus of nearly a year. Not only does he insinuate that he murdered Thea, he begins stalking Shaw physically and issues threats to her, her children and her other sister, Madison. Janson’s intrusion prompts Shaw to reexamine every aspect of Thea’s poorly investigated case. She tracks down the two friends who were with Thea last, certain they are holding back crucial details.
Meanwhile, Shaw is training a young fingerprint analyst and investigating multiple cases, including a murder and an increasingly worrisome string of arsons. Shaw is an intriguing character, driven and determined in every aspect of her life, while examining her predicaments with both raw truth and humor. A nurturer at heart, she’s also hard-edged, prompting her boss to plead, “Stop cursing. It’s like working on the set of a George Carlin HBO special.”
French skillfully weaves together an intricate plot involving past and present, bringing both to life while believably developing her cast of characters. She constantly increases the tension in the cat-and-mouse game between Shaw and Anders, who is chillingly intelligent and eerily patient. A Maine resident, French seamlessly integrates the state’s rural, rugged terrain into the narrative, as she also does with Shaw’s fingerprint knowledge. Shaw’s career specialty is a nice twist in the detective genre, as readers watch her process scenes and testify in court. “I wanted to stop the bad guys,” she explains, a mission she’s been on since Thea’s disappearance. By the end of the book, the action fires on all cylinders in the midst of a blinding snowstorm.
In Shaw Connolly Lives to Tell, Shaw puts everything on the line, including her life, taking readers on a wild journey full of thrilling twists and turns.