3 minute read
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BENNETTS by Lisa Scottoline
what happened to the bennetts
QUANTUM GIRL THEORY
Ryan, Erin Kate Random House (272 pp.) $28.00 | March 8, 2022 978-0-593-13343-9
A clairvoyant with a secret past visits a town to assist a missing person investigation and finds herself navigating even more mysteries than she bargained for. “Every space was haunted by something,” muses Mary, the protagonist of Ryan’s inventive debut. It is Bladen County, North Carolina, in 1961, and Mary, a White New Englander, has arrived clutching a MISSING poster of Polly Starking, a local White girl who has disappeared. Mary is there to work: She has “the Sight,” and her particular psychic ability manifests in visions of missing girls. But her desire to help is only partly based on altruism. Alone, unmarried, and running from her former life, she desperately needs the reward money from cases like Polly’s. The townspeople blow hot and cold about Mary’s presence: They desire her help at the same time they deeply mistrust her. As the sheriff attempts to get Mary to leave, Mary encounters Martha, a Black motel maid who is willing to help Mary navigate her day-to-day needs for food and shelter (as well as the nuances of the Jim Crow South) if Mary will use her abilities to find two other missing girls the town isn’t talking about—two Black girls, Evie and Jack, who are in a romantic relationship. Based on the real-life disappearance of Bennington student Paula Jean Welden in 1946, Ryan’s novel takes up what true-crime aficionados would call the “less dead”: victims of violence or missing people from marginalized communities who fail to garner the same attention as idealized victims—namely, straight young White women. Ryan takes a meta approach here; the novel is as much about the way we mythologize this type of missing and murdered victim as it is a twisty mystery about Mary’s hunt for Polly, Evie, and Jack.
A puzzler that is both brainy and full of satisfying narrative brawn.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BENNETTS
Scottoline, Lisa Putnam (400 pp.) $28.00 | March 29, 2022 978-0-525-53967-4
A hypernormal suburban family’s trip home from their daughter’s soccer game leads them down a rabbit hole of criminal complications. For some reason—maybe just because it’s a Mercedes—a pair of gunslingers pick court reporter Jason Bennett’s ride to carjack as he drives along a quiet road with his wife, photographer Lucinda, and their teenagers, Allison and Ethan. In the scuffle that follows, one of the carjackers is shot along with Allison, who dies in the hospital. Wait, it gets worse. A pair of FBI agents knocks on the Bennetts’ door at 3 a.m. to tell them that John Milo, the escaped carjacker, has framed Jason for the murder of his accomplice, George Veria Jr., in order to save himself from the wrath of Junior’s father, the kingpin of the George Veria Organization. Time is of the essence, the agents assure Jason and Lucinda: They have to leave their house and their old lives behind right now and go into the witness protection program. Sure enough, minutes after the three shellshocked Bennetts allow themselves to be driven off, a representative of the GVO sets fire to their house and follows up the next day with similar fires at Jason’s and Lucinda’s offices. Warned off social media, the Bennetts can only watch helplessly as their friends and neighbors issue pleas for them to get in touch and self-styled “citizen detective” Bryan Krieger decides to launch his own freelance investigation, fueled by slanderous innuendo. Every time Jason thinks he’s finally got the situation figured out, Scottoline tosses in explosive new complications in the most relentless of all her mysteries.
