My love for T. Greenwood has been well-documented in this blog, and I eagerly await every one of her new novels. Thankfully she’s prolific, and with Where I Lost Her, she adds a level of suspense and mystery to complicated family dynamics she so deftly creates for each book.

Tess is in trouble. She drinks too much, and she’s just learned something awful about her husband, Jake. On a visit to her childhood friend, Effie (from Greenwood’s debut Breathing Water), Tess is drunk driving home from buying more booze when she sees something in the woods–a little girl, maybe 4 years old. The little girl runs and Tess can’t get a signal on her phone. But when Tess finally calls the police, there are no missing children of the little girl’s age, and Tess has things in her past and present that make her a less-than-credible witness.

While Greenwood remains concerned with the interpersonal, the external plot she’s created here hangs together tightly and resolves itself in a most satisfying way. Even better, she manages to side-step a lot of familiar genre tropes and that made me very happy. Not only is the book, deep, it’s also smart, and full of the deep heart that Greenwood has made her authorial signature. She wears the genre well.