Isabella Moon
By Laura Benedict
(Ballantine Books, Hardcover, 9780345497673, 368pp.)
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback, Compact Disc, Compact Disc, MP3 CD, MP3 CD
Categories: Suspense
 |     |
“Isabella Moon is a book of secrets and dark miracles. Laura Benedict writes with tender power and understanding, filling the pages with characters whose mysteries and longings will matter to every reader.”
–Luanne Rice, author of The Edge of Winter
Sometimes the past comes looking for you. . . .
Two years ago, in idyllic Carystown, Kentucky, nine-year-old Isabella Moon disappeared on her way home from school. Is it just coincidence that Kate Russell, a young woman with no discernible past, arrived in town just months before Isabella’s disappearance? When Kate walks into Sheriff Bill Delaney’s office to tell him that Isabella’s ghost has led her to the child’s hidden grave, he immediately views her as a suspect. Mystery follows mystery as a local athlete drops dead, inexplicably, on the basketball court, and someone close to Kate is viciously murdered.
Quiet Carystown was to be Kate’s salvation, and she’s settled into a comfortable job, a charming cottage, and a blissful romance. But having lied to her boyfriend, Caleb, for so long about the terrors of her past life, she finds she can’t trust him to understand the terror that Isabella Moon has now brought. And Kate’s best friend, Francie, is too wrapped up in her own troubles–particularly a secret affair with a man she at once loves and despises–to give Kate the help she needs. Utterly alone, Kate is torn between finding justice for the dead child and keeping away old ghosts of her own.
The unsolved disappearance of Isabella Moon has been the biggest disappointment of Sheriff Delaney’s career. But he senses that Kate is trouble. As he investigates her impossible claims, he also uncovers a series of unsettling truths about Carystown itself. Behind his hometown’s genteel façade is a morass of lies and murder, drugs and destruction. And Carystown’s residents are about to discover that even though the past is buried, it can rise again–with a vengeance.
Dark and suspenseful, tense and eerie, tinged with the supernatural, Isabella Moon is an engrossing, beautifully written debut novel, a breathtaking and artful story of the dark mysteries that can lurk in the most bucolic of places–and the ghost of a little girl who watches as evil rises unstoppably to the surface.
Laura Benedict’s short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and a number of anthologies. For the past decade she has worked as a freelance book reviewer for The Grand Rapids Press in Michigan and other newspapers. She lives in southern Illinois, with her husband, Pinckney Benedict, and their two children. Isabella Moon is her first novel.
Advance praise for Isabella Moon
“Isabella Moon is a book of secrets and dark miracles. Laura Benedict writes with tender power and understanding, filling the pages with characters whose mysteries and longings will matter to every reader.”
–Luanne Rice, author of The Edge of Winter
“Like digging up an unmarked grave in the gloaming, Isabella Moon is a tense and creepy hunt for the truth about what lies beneath. With a missing child, a reluctant medium hiding secrets of her own, and a picture-perfect Southern town resting on a foundation of sex, drugs and lies, Laura Benedict’s debut will definitely have readers sleeping with the lights on–if they sleep at all.”
–Lisa Unger, author of Beautiful Lies
“Lordy, what a rich read–deliciously complex, suspenseful as a night in Guantanamo, and chock-full of the to-and-fro I delight in. I love its main characters, each, to quote Donny and Marie, a little bit country and a little bit rock’n’roll, and by that turn of phrase I mean to highlight their crosswire natures. The pickles they’ve gotten themselves into are dark and dire, evil of every degree: a whole world of lies and terrible secrets and tawdry if too-human needs. I am reminded of Greg Iles and the Kellerman duo, but Isabella Moon has a rising gusto that puts it far ahead of those in that pack.”
–Lee K. Abbott, author of Living After Midnight
“Told with intelligence, precision, and an essential artfulness, Laura Benedict’s haunting and sharp Isabella Moon is not unlike The Lovely Bones, but bigger, faster, and with a much broader scope. You won’t forget these characters or the story that fuels them. A joy to read from first to last.”
–Fred G. Leebron, author of Out West
 |
1Q84 Haruki Murakami Knopf |
 |
The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Straus, and Giroux |
 |
The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Knopf |
 |
Death Comes to Pemberley PD James Knopf |
