The Dry meets Silence of the Lambs in this intoxicating tale of literary suspense set in the relentless Alaskan landscape about madness and obsession, loneliness and grief, and the ferocious bonds of family …

It’s 1941 in small-town Alaska and Elisabeth Pfautz is alone. She’s living far from home, struggling through an unhappy marriage, and she spends her days tutoring her precocious young daughter. Elisabeth’s twin sister disappeared without a trace twenty years earlier, and Elisabeth’s life has never recovered. Cryptic visions of her sister haunt her dreams, and Elisabeth’s crushing loneliness grows more intense by the day. But through it all, she clings to one belief: That her sister is still alive, and that they’ll be reunited one day.

And that day may be coming soon. Elisabeth’s world is upended when Alfred Seidel — an enigmatic German bush pilot — arrives in town and murders a local man in cold blood. Sitting in his cell in the wake of his crime, Alfred refuses to speak to anyone except for Elisabeth. He has something to tell her: He knows exactly what happened to her long-missing sister, but he’ll reveal this truth only if Elisabeth fulfills three requests.

Increasingly isolated from her neighbors and imprisoned by the bitter cold and her own obsession, Elisabeth lets herself slip deeper into Alfred’s web. A tenuous friendship forms between them, even as Elisabeth struggles to understand Alfred’s game and what he’s after.

But if it means she’ll get answers, she’s willing to play by his rules. She’s ready to sacrifice whatever it takes to be reunited with her sister, even if it means putting herself — and her family — in mortal danger.

Many thanks to Penguin Random House and Berkley Publishing for this ARC that I won through Publisher’s Weekly! I love a good thriller, and this one delivers not only that incredible tension that I crave, but a mystery so dark that it really does take connecting clue after clue until the very end where the truth hits you like a bomb. When you strip down those elements, it is a compelling tale of the hardships women face, with or without tragedy, and the difficulty of not losing sight of who you are after marriage, children, and the death of your wildest dreams.

We meet Elisabeth in 1941, living in a very small Alaskan town. She is a German immigrant who has been touched by pain all of her life, but has risen above this to start a new life with her husband, John, and her daughter, Margaret. Despite fleeting moments of happiness, she feels unfulfilled, and is haunted by the memory of her younger sister who went missing when they were eleven. They lived in Pennsylvania then, and the timeline switches effortlessly from Else’s present day to her distressing past. She patched up the hole in her heart as best she could, but the stitches are ripped wide open once she meets a substitute postman by the name of Alfred.

Alfred runs into some issues with his plane and asks to stay with Elisabeth. She feels obligated to comply, and things quickly go downhill. Her best friend in the town is shortly thereafter murdered by this stranger, and in the wake of his arrest, he asks to speak to Elisabeth. She complies, only to get closure with her friend’s death as she was not afforded that luxury with her sister. The unthinkable happens as Alfred claims to know exactly what happened to her sister, and that he can lead her to Jacqueline if she will agree to his demands. Thus begins a long and terrifying game of cat and mouse as Elisabeth risks everything she knows and loves for the hope of being reunited with her other half; her twin.

The glimpses of the past show us Elisabeth’s childhood, and the headstrong girl that was her twin sister. They made plans to leave their poverty-stricken hometown for a big city, never to look back. Elisabeth thought it was all in great fun, playing along with her best friend in the world, but didn’t ever consider a day where it would come true. They were all her father had, as their mother had been taken by cancer when they were much younger. Then Jacky met someone who promised to help them succeed with The Plan, and then she went missing. 

Thoughts that she could have told someone or done something to stop it filled her mind, and Jacqueline plagued her dreams. Her heart turned to ice on the spot, and it is only when presented with Alfred’s game that she begins to feel herself thaw, and though she is finding herself again, she is losing touch with her husband, and her daughter is shifting into someone she no longer recognizes. It’s thrilling to watch her try to put out fires on every side of her, wondering when she will catch flame as well. 

All this to say, I was hooked from the first sentence, and finished in such a flurry that the title made me laugh, because the book itself quickly disappeared as I devoured it, page by page. The way the novel comes to a close could lend itself to a sequel, but it also works as a very sobering ending for a standalone. Either way, I really look forward to more from this author, and it is such an honor to know I was one of the first to read his debut!

5/5 stars