SHE FELL AWAY

A unique investigator, an unusual setting, and a high-stakes, well-crafted mystery.

Lake Harlowe knows the burden of trying to outrun a traumatic past. Maybe this is what led her to join the foreign service, where she works to support American citizens who travel abroad and run into any kind of trouble. Her previous post in Phnom Penh just a few weeks behind her, Lake is beginning to lean into her new appointment in Wellington, New Zealand, when she receives a death notification for a wealthy American, seemingly from an accidental overdose. Her call to his family, who owns the Trophy casino in Las Vegas, is combative and volatile, and leaves her spent—until she gets a call that another young American, also from Las Vegas and with ties to the Trophy, has gone missing: Bowie Bishop, an aspiring musician. Through emotional phone calls with Bowie’s mother, the aging rocker-turned-cocktail-waitress Suzie, and her own investigation into the people closest to Bowie—her host family in Wellington; a dashing local musician with whom she shared the stage a time or two; an American expatriate music producer—Lake finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into something dark that may have already swallowed Bowie whole. Having grown up in a cult in Alaska, Lake is no stranger to darkness, and she has closed herself off from making personal connections outside of her irascible three-legged cat. But something about Bowie’s case gets under her skin—as does handsome Kiwi police officer Mason Yates. In tone as well as character, Nash successfully builds a modern noir here. Lake, like any good noir detective, desperately tries to armor herself against hurt, but it’s her vulnerability and woundedness that makes her good at her job. It’s also her (or Nash’s) poetic way with descriptions and metaphors that echo masters of the genre like Chandler: “I close my eyes and corpses wash across the darkness like nightmare northern lights.”

A perfect balance of old style and new, high art and low. Here’s hoping there’s a sequel.