THE NIGHT SHE DIED

Sad rich girl moves to small town, gets in trouble, dies, leaves heartache behind.

Having exercised her right to tell off her rich, stiff old Republican daddy and move in with an environmentalist ten years her senior, Lara showed (herself at least) that she was independent. Then, after the beau dies in a car accident, Lara bottles up her pain and anguish and hits the road, looking for somewhere to crash. She lands in Winston, Georgia, a dying town stuck between Atlanta and Athens. The Dairy Queen is the only restaurant open on Sunday, and everybody knows everyone’s business. Lara gets herself a rambling old house and makes a couple of friends: Eric, a bearded introvert and amateur photographer who runs the only record store in town, and Sterling, a gorgeous punk teenager who works at Eric’s store (and the DQ) and has a fierce crush on her. This all gets filled in later, though; the story begins with a police officer interrogating Sterling about Lara’s murder. Only a few months after she arrived in Winston, somebody has put five bullets into her in the middle of the night. First-novelist Patrick interleaves the murder investigation with the tale of how Eric and Sterling fell in love with Lara, despite the vicious gossip about her that spread poisonously through the town. In this stalled, stilted anti-romance, both men try to spend as much time as possible around morose but winsome Lara, fighting with each other and eventually lashing out at her. Lara mourns her dead lover yet feels a desperate need for companionship, and the resulting flirty, teasing relationship is as frustrating to the reader as it is to Eric and Sterling. The author gives Winston a good, lived-in feel, but she lets the people run mostly on autopilot, too many of them fulfilling a stereotype of one kind or another.

Culture clash, southern heat, and murder: it’s all readable but not as gripping as it ought to be.