November 27, 2023
In this elegant debut, Vingtras details the high-stakes search for a missing child from the alternating perspectives of four narrators. Bess, an attractive young woman, has lost track of a precocious, initially unnamed 10-year-old boy in the middle of a heavy snowstorm somewhere in Alaska (“I let go of his hand to retie my laces and I lost him”). As the storm grows fiercer, Bess’s search for the boy intensifies, and the three other narrators come into focus. Benedict lives with Bess for unspecified reasons and is particularly invested in recovering the child; Cole is their rage-filled, alcoholic neighbor; and Freeman, a military veteran and ex-cop, has traveled to Alaska on a mysterious assignment. In short, spiky chapters, Vingtras slowly doles out clues about the characters’ connections to one another, keeping readers deliciously off-balance as Bess’s search for her charge joins up with larger, more sinister machinations. With masterly pacing, the author knits together a noirish and affecting tale about desperate souls colliding. It’s worth staying up all night to finish.