Holt Davidson returns to his hometown of Thompsonville, Colorado, to bury his mother, who has died by suicide. While dealing with her effects, Holt finds a box containing a gun, a gruesome photograph of a dead man, and a love letter. Who is the man in the photograph, and did Holt's mother kill him? Who wrote the love letter? Is Holt's sister, who has been in a mental institution since her teenage years, somehow involved? As Holt unravels his family's past, he learns quickly that memory and truth can be very different things. From the beginning, Bassoff creates a powerful sense of place, heavy with dread. Throughout, the characters experience only fleeting moments of joy, but even those are surrounded by angst. The various points of view connect past and present smoothly, and the pace will keep the reader's attention. Those who catch on to the conclusion will hope they're wrong but may be sadly disappointed. This is a haunting and disturbing yet compelling novel, in the vein of Jen Williams' A Dark and Disturbing Place (2021) and C. J. Tudor's The Burning Girls (2021).

Two violent deaths in the same spot 34 years apart bookend an American family horror story from the heartland. In 2018, Vivian Davidson returns to the ruin of the house in Thompsonville, Colorado, where she shot former lover Ruben Ray to death back in 1984, to hang herself. Why did she kill Ruben, and why did she wait so long after getting away with murder to kill herself? These are only the first of the many questions that torment Holt Davidson, the son who pulls himself away from his job as a firefighter in Topeka to come to her funeral after learning of his mother's death from her best friend, police widow Joyce Brandt. It's a small service, attended mostly by Pastor Boswell and Vivian's fellow congregants from the First Lutheran Church. Vivian's brother, musician Bobby Hartwick, isn't there because he's playing on the road somewhere, and Holt's older sister, Ophelia Davidson, isn't there because she's staying in a halfway house after long years of institutionalization following a breakdown. Looking through his mother's house in search of answers, Holt finds several things--a handgun, a Polaroid shot of the dead Ruben, an unsigned love letter--that raise even more questions, and he sets out in dogged pursuit of the truth. Each damning new confession he wrings from the people connected to the two fatalities attempts to paper over the even more shocking revelations to come, and each of these revelations brings new grief. No wonder Holt tells Joyce: "I should stop digging. Before it's too late." But it's already too late. A powerful family melodrama drenched in sadness and guilt with hints of redemption. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.