55 pages • 1 hour read
Paula McLainA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The book opens with a series of descriptions of how mothers react to being told about their dead or missing children—panic, grief, the struggle to pretend everything is “normal.” The vignettes close with Detective Anna Hart revealing her own reaction to the death of her daughter and, with paramedics on-site, how she could not bring herself to let go of her child’s dead body.
Beneath an eerie yellow autumn moon, Anna Hart leaves San Francisco and heads north to Mendocino. She feels alone and has realized, “[n]o one is coming to save me. No one can save anyone, though I once believed differently” (7). That night, at a hotel in Santa Rosa, Anna pumps breast milk that she knows she should flush down the toilet, but she stores it in the room’s mini refrigerator. As she watches the evening news, a story about a train wreck that killed 47 commuters in Alabama, she considers a world full of “chaos and despair and senseless death” (10).
Struggling to sleep, Anna thinks about a case she worked, a grandmother who poisoned her grandson for no reason. Anna recalls her husband of seven years, Brendan, back in San Francisco: “We can fix this,” she says, to which he responds, “Some things aren’t fixable, Anna” (12).
By Paula McLain
Books on Justice & Injustice
View Collection
Guilt
View Collection
Historical Fiction
View Collection
Horror, Thrillers, & Suspense
View Collection
Mystery & Crime
View Collection
New York Times Best Sellers
View Collection
Popular Study Guides
View Collection
Safety & Danger
View Collection
The Best of "Best Book" Lists
View Collection