I enjoyed this a lot. It was peopled with a lot of fabulous characters. I often have trouble with the concept that people stay in the towns where they grew up, even after traumatic events have happened to them, and live their lives in the shadow of their teenage years. It’s a long way from my experience but maybe my experience is the weird one (it often is), though I’m struggling to think of anyone I knew at school who still lives in the same town, but maybe we were all the odd ones. Anyway, that’s why I found the whole teenagers still in much the same place thirty years on a bit unbelievable at the start of this book, but it grew on me as the book developed and there turned out to be reasons for most things.

The story starts with future small town police chief Walker, then a teenager, finding the body of a young girl. Then we go forward in time to his forties and see how he helps with the young girl’s troubled older sister and her own two children, and then there’s a new present day tragedy to deal with.

A few of the supporting cast were a bit stereotyped but the central characters were great, and definitely not stereotypes. While I was reading I felt there were issues with the plot, things that weren’t being covered that should have been, things that seemed all a bit off. Well, eventually the plot arrived at those, so that’s good, and it all made sense in the end. Because it was the first book I’d read by the author I didn’t trust that everything would be resolved, next time I will.

All in all, it was a solid entertaining read, a bit of a roller coaster in places, but hang on in there and, yes, you begin at the end and you get back to the start.