Joining a cult is easy, getting out alive is another story. Two years after the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Amanda Reid, the family’s wealthy matriarch hires a Toronto PI to find her daughter. But as the family’s sinister tapestry unravels, someone will do anything to keep the truth hidden.
This is a solid debut for Fraser. The plot, in brief: A frigid matriarch and her henpecked husband live in the Canadian countryside. The couple are well-off, with one daughter who is a successful novelist, and another daughter with a penchant for religious fundamentalism, the latter of whom disappeared a couple of years back.
Enter Detective Sam McNamara, a tough female P.I., who is freshly returned from a headline-grabbing case involving a serial killer called "Incubus." She is hired by the father of the disappeared girl (and she is likewise despised by his wife), and her investigation leads her down a dark path, to a foreboding sanctuary where bodies and secrets are buried in abundance.
This is a deftly plotted novel that kept me reading and guessing until the end. My only gripe (and it's a minor one) is that the cast is a smidgen too large, especially re: a subplot about a suicidal musician. That's an ecumenical complaint, however, and, without giving anything more away, I was excited to discover at the end of the novel that a sequel is almost certainly assured.—Joseph Hirsch, Author of Veterans’ Affairs