WHATEVER HAPPENED TO EDDY CRANE?

A daughter searches for answers.

First-time author Crane left childhood behind at age 12, when her father, Eddy, failed to come home from his job at a machinery company he co-owned in a seedy section of Baltimore on toxic Curtis Bay. Though his body was never found, his beloved Mercedes was later discovered parked at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, with his equally beloved rottweiler wandering nearby. Though suspicion immediately fell on Eddy’s business partner (the two had had an ugly fight over bookkeeping), the case quickly went cold. It remained notorious among Baltimore cops and reporters as the sole missing-person case filed with homicide cold cases decades later. Eddy’s ostensible widow, the author’s mother, was frustratingly tight-lipped about the details surrounding her husband’s mysterious disappearance, and Crane felt like she was alone in her debilitating post-traumatic dysfunctionality. Though she managed to finish college, move to New York, and begin a career in journalism, her father’s case haunted her, and so she resolved to exorcise it using her skills as a journalist to find out the truth. “This book is a work of journalism, and this book is a memoir,” she writes, describing her hybrid approach. “The two forms have separate standards and conventions that intertwine in this book, with the dominance of memoir versus journalism shifting throughout.” A gifted writer with deep reserves of feeling and talent for describing it, she might be said to have succeeded better as a memoirist, but only because the details she uncovers lead to uncertain justice. Ultimately, the forms blend seamlessly.

A story with jaw-dropping twists told by a writer to watch.