THE MORTICIAN’S DAUGHTER

Bloom follows See Isabelle Run (2005) with a tale of a New Yorker transplanted back to the life she hasn’t quite left behind.

Suspended from the NYPD for helping her boyfriend tamper with a rape kit, detective Ginny Lavoie has no badge or gun when she goes back to the Berkshires to help her childhood friend Sonya find out who murdered her son Danny. But how could she refuse to investigate a beating so vicious that even Ginny, who lived upstairs from the Lavoie Funeral Home, finds the crime-scene photos disturbing? It was Sonya’s house where she ate pierogies while her parents bickered, Sonya who sat through endless hours of Pippi Longstocking movies with her at the Mohawk Theater, Sonya whose childhood ended abruptly at 15 when her wayward sister, Paula, left town, leaving infant Danny in her charge. Although she married her high-school sweetheart Pete Markowicz shortly after graduation, Danny was the only child Sonya ever had. So Ginny goes home—braving increasingly persistent dinner invitations from Aunt Lisette and even more dangerous invitations from her high-school honey Jimmy Griffin to resume their turbocharged sexual relationship—to lock horns with Chief Rolly and the other local VIPs content to pin the crime on Jack O’Brien, a mentally challenged vagrant.

Fast, sharp and literate, Bloom’s second makes you hope that, like Jimmy, she’ll give Ginny another tumble.