THE BODY BELOW

A brief, unnerving encounter in a beloved swimming spot sends a disgraced but still employed reporter on a quest to find his sister’s killer.

Years after his attempt to take down a corrupt senator turned on him and got him fired from the Washington Post, Connor Whitman is working for the Richfield Herald, the paper in his Vermont hometown, which was willing to overlook his checkered past. During one of his daily long-distance swims in the Richfield Reservoir, he bumps into a squishy, partially submerged object he quickly loses sight of. When his memory is jogged later, he realizes that it might have been the bagged body of Gertrude “Trudy” Carlson, a single mom who’s gone missing. What he can’t have imagined is that Trudy was born Laurel Whitman, the sister from whom he’s long been estranged. Even that’s not the only tie the missing woman has to his past, for her first husband was Mason King, Conn’s childhood friend and present-day sheriff’s deputy. Alternating perspectives between Conn and his girlfriend, Celine Gabrielli, the guidance counselor at the school Trudy’s two children attend, Hecht follows Conn’s quest to ascertain the fate of the sister he’d never really known. Two subplots that erupt along the way—one concerning David Laughlin, a serial abuser who hits on every female employee in a local shop, the other involving the affairs of Anthony Shapiro, the latest of Trudy’s many ex-boyfriends—are so explosive that they threaten to take the limelight off Trudy, except of course for Conn and Celine.

A soulful, improbable, and ultimately cathartic plunge into the depths.