Rabbit Hole

Kate Brody, Soho Crime (JAN 2) Hardcover $25.95 (384pp), 978-1-64129-487-4

A father’s suicide shakes loose family secrets, reigniting interest in a cold case, in Kate Brody’s engrossing thriller Rabbit Hole.

A decade past her older half-sister’s disappearance, Teddy teaches in the high school where her last name became infamous. There’s still local sympathy—and judgment—around her family’s story: Angie, the disappeared daughter, was both Mark’s niece and his stepdaughter; Mark left his wife and son to marry Angie’s widowed mother. Though these decisions were all made before Teddy’s time, her childhood was still shadowed by their implications. When Mark drives off a bridge, Teddy’s mother is the only family member who she’s left with—at least, the only one who’s willing to talk to anyone in her family’s shunned branch.

Bereft, Teddy begins to investigate what pushed her father over the edge. A true crime message board proffers leads; it connects Teddy to Mickey, who’s morose, younger, and remembers Angie’s disappearance well, and to Bill, a former classmate who teaches her about firearms and in whose arms she seeks comfort. Pulled against her better judgment toward conspiracy theories and wild suspicions, Teddy begins to cross ethical lines. She brings a weapon to school. She forces herself into her half-brother’s family, prompting legal warnings. And she begins to wonder about becoming a mother herself, in a town where everyone would rather she not.

Teddy is a complicated heroine whose ill-advised decisions and self-destructive tendencies make her less than sympathetic, though also impossible to ignore. Her descent is swift and systematic, leading to sensationalist developments and voyeuristic turns. No one and nothing, she learns, should be trusted—including her own tangled memories.

The dark corners of the internet feed a teacher’s investigation into her sister’s probable murder in the contemporary thriller Rabbit Hole.