Bring Her Home. David
Bell. Penguin Publishing Group. July 2017. 464 pp. ISBN #: 9780399584442.
Summer
and her best friend Haley have disappeared.
Now, a year and a half after the death of Summer’s Mom, Bill, learns
that his daughter Summer is in the hospital in the Intensive Care Unit and
Haley is dead! No one yet knows what
happened; all that is known is that both girls were found badly beaten. On his arrival at the hospital, Bill is angry
about all the unknowns and wants to go speak to the guys the girls used to hang
around. Haley’s parents arrive to
comfort him, remarkable to say the least since their loss is a million times
worse than his.
A
few weeks later, the unbelievable happens!
It turns out that the girls used to switch clothes all the time and it’s
really Summer who has been killed and Haley who is alive! It’s beyond one’s imagination and one can barely
understand Bill’s shock and grief. Add
to that another girl is missing! Then
there’s a question about whether it was Summer who was dead! Crazy-making revelations!
This
then is the story of a mystery left to unfold!
By now we know that Bill has a definite anger management problem and
that he has been questioned about his own relationship with Summer and her
Mom. But that’s minor compared to the
facts about to be revealed. The solution
lies with a very friendly neighbor and a bunch of guys trying to up the ante on
their competitive reputation as womanizers, that is, tallying the number of
girls they’ve slept with. Silly and
childish, right? But what happens when
some go too far?
Bring Her Home is a mystery, a crime thriller! It also, however, is a satire on those who
live daily lives without really paying attention to what spouses and children
are doing on a day-to-day basis. It’s a
call to awareness as a few hours can make all the difference between life and
death!
Stunning
novel that, although somewhat contrived, is a spine-tingling, hair-raising
read!
