It's 1977 in St. Cloud, Minnesota. The summer is sticky hot, and the local kids like to gather at the quarries for swimming and partying and the underground tunnels in part of the town make for a cool air reprieve for some of the teens.
At the beginning of the book, we learn that teenage Beth the waitress has been abducted as she leaves work one evening. The book flashes back and forth between her nightmare experience, the town trying to find her, and a group of teens.
Heather, Maureen and Brenda play in a rock band and Heather's little sister Junie is often hanging out with them. Heather's father is the local district attorney who is at work all the time and her mother has completely checked out mentally, leaving young Heather with far too much responsibility on her fifteen-year-old shoulders. A handful of young men come into the story as possible romantic interests of the three girls in the band.
One day when Heather, Brenda, Junie, and their friend Claude are messing around in the tunnels they open a door to find several adult men waiting their turn to participate in a sex act with sixteen-year-old Maureen. They only see one of the men's faces before they run away. When more girls start to disappear and turn up dead it's clear that there is something sinister going on in their small town.
Replete with telephone party lines, shag carpet, macrame decor and Farrah Fawcett hairstyles, Lourey really captures the seventies in her depiction. The Midwest is almost as much of a character as the people in this story, not only present in the Minnesota hotdish but in the reticent attitudes. Heather has this thought at one point: "if we didn't like something we simply didn't see it. The problem wasn't the person who made the mistake, it was the person who acknowledged it".
It's a race against time as Beth tries to escape from captivity and Heather tries to figure out who is hurting her peers. The girls in this story are the heroines as they deal with the toxic masculinity of the era and the men of the town that are a threat to their very lives. Jess Lourey writes a good thriller (Unspeakable Things was outstanding!) and this newest one is no exception.
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