Not That I Could Tell

On a Saturday night in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a group of neighborhood women gather around a fire pit where their backyards meet. They have just found out that their baby monitors reach that far, and a rare evening without children has them giddy. The wine flows, and the talk turns personal.

By Monday morning, Kristin is gone. She is a twin mom, a college administrator and a doctor's wife, and she seemed fairly untroubled by her coming divorce. The police investigation raises more questions than it answers, and her husband, Paul, sits at the center of them.

Three neighbors carry the story. Clara lives closest to Kristin, and the disappearance stirs memories she believed she had left behind. She cannot step out of the widening circle of scrutiny, and her own suspicions grow. Izzy, the newest arrival on the street, refuses to jump to conclusions, partly because she is dealing with a crisis of her own.

The case moves from a media circus to a cold case, and the neighbors begin to look hard at what happens behind their own closed doors. This is a suspense novel about a close community, told at a slow-burning pace, in a town where everyone knows something about everyone else and no one can explain what happened. It is the second novel by Jessica Strawser.