Amber's Thoughts

Asked to write a book about the trial of Ashlyn Bryant—a young woman accused of murdering her toddler daughter and leaving her in a trash bag in Boston Harbor—Mercer Hennessey is finally working again after over a year of grieving the loss of her own young daughter and her beloved husband. An accident she survived. The psychological effects of the new assignment on Mercer are deep and often painful, but she commits to it.

Both little girls had favorite toy rabbits, and each in a different way was buried with her bunny. Eventually the mothers go down a rabbit hole of truth and lies and variations on lies together.

The mechanics of a criminal trial and the process of researching and reporting are given in authentic detail without excess. Mercer’s research and her attempts to build a story from what she knows are part of the suspense. Once Ashlyn is acquitted, the stories—the one we’re reading and the one Mercer is writing—take a stunning twist, and so does Mercer’s trust in everything she thought was true. She’s now writing Ashlyn’s “as told to” story, and the young woman has a powerful effect on her. Is the book going to be fact or fiction? Was Mercer’s own past fact or fiction? Ashlyn’s personality is disturbingly well portrayed—her shifts from hard to soft, from inarticulate to smart and clear, her changing versions of her past. How Mercer makes her way through the web of confusion is as important as the investigation of the crime.

This book has no onstage violence. The crimes are in the past. Yet the threat is intense and the suspense unbearable. Plan on losing sleep to the need to read the next chapter. And the next. And the next.