Today, I have the chance to let you read an extract from Alice LaPlante's latest crime novel, Half Moon Bay. I was going to write that I hope you enjoy it, but having read the extract, I'll amend that to say that I hope that you are intrigued enough to want to read the entire story.
Here's what the publishers at Titan Books have to say:
She thought she could run from her past...
A smart, haunting tale of psychological suspense from the
New York Times bestselling author of Turn of Mind. In Half Moon Bay LaPlante
plays with form and structure to perfectly captures her protagonist’s grief and
fragile state of mind to create a deftly written and intricately plotted
thriller that you won’t want to miss this autumn.
Jane O’Malley loses everything when her teenage daughter is
killed in a senseless accident. Devastated, she moves from San Francisco to the
tiny seaside town of Half Moon Bay. As the months go by she finds some peace,
then children begin to disappear, and Jane wonders if she will be able to live
through the aching loss, the fear once again surrounding her, until fingers of
suspicion all begin to point at her.
Extract
They find little Heidi McCready eight days after she
disappeared. Her body discovered by the side of Route 1 just south of Montara,
in a field of late-blooming tiger stripes (Coreopsis tinctoria).
She had been carefully, even lovingly, wrapped in a woven
Indian-style blanket, the kind they sell at the San Gregorio Store and a
thousand other places in the Bay Area. Nothing unique about it. Her black hair
had been combed and tied back with a pink ribbon. Most disturbingly, her eyes
were open, and she had been made up expertly with foundation, rouge, and
lipstick, nothing excessive, but enough to make her appear still alive and
blooming to the teenagers who’d found her. According to the Moon News, they’d
tramped through the field on their way to a grove of Monterey pines that was a
popular high school party site and literally stumbled across her, a small
figure lying flat, peacefully contemplating the night sky.
*
What? Why? Who? There are nothing but questions. The town is
horror-struck. But Jane welcomes a sort of equilibrium: for once, the
atmosphere in the external world mirrors her internal darkness. The weather
cooperates, serving up wind and fog and pelting rain that feels like tiny
bullets to the face. For the first time in more than a year, Jane feels human
again, connected to others of her species by a common grief.
*
The loss goes forward as well as back. The loss of what
would have been in addition to mourning what was lost. Today Angela would have
been seventeen. She would have started her senior year in high school, would
have been applying to college. Jane is looking ahead at grim milestones of this
kind for decades. By now, Angela would be graduating from college. By now,
advancing in her career. What would she have done? Jane would have bet on a
scientist. Angela, underneath her teenage rebellion and emotionalism, possessed
a fact-centric personality. Jane would never have dared to make an argument
without backing it up with numbers. A data-driven girl.
The average teenage hours per day spent goofing off: 5.81.
(See! I’m not weird!)
The most valued or essential relationship for high school
students: their mother (47 percent). (Angela hated that one.)
Percentage of high schoolers who have had sex: 41.2 percent.
(So there.)
Twenty-nine percent of teens have posted mean info,
embarrassing photos, or spread rumors about someone on Facebook. (That doesn’t
make me feel any better.)
Not that any of this helped much in the combative teenage
years. But it held out hope for the future. A future that didn’t exist anymore.
*
The
Moon News says the police are not releasing the cause of death, but the buzz at
Three Sisters, always on the money, is that there weren’t any apparent wounds
or injuries. Nothing that marred Heidi’s appearance, as
unprepossessing in death as it had been in life.
That poor kid, says Helen to Jane quietly the morning the
news broke. That poor poor family. Already, a shrine has appeared, a large one,
with a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and hundreds of bouquets of flowers
strewn at her feet alongside Route 1 near the field where little Heidi was
found. Half Moon Bay has never experienced a child abduction, much less a child
murder, in anyone’s living memory.
Jane is conflicted. She should be ashamed to feel joy in
someone else’s misfortune, yet the inevitable schadenfreude has raised its ugly
head. I told you so. The madnesses descend, one by one. Jane takes out her
spreadsheet, and with shaking fingers, types 10s in all the cells. She calls
her shrink for an unsatisfactory session of hand-holding. But the madnesses
have taken over her world.
*
Naturally the teenagers who found Heidi documented the scene
with their cell phones; that’s what this generation does. They order a meal,
they take a photo and post it. They find a dead body, they do the same. The
police tried to clamp down on the distribution of the crime scene photos, but it
was too late. Jane sees the phones being taken out at the Three Sisters,
studied, handed around, but manages to decline with a semblance of sanity when
someone offers to show her what’s on one of them. She’s seen it all already.
Jane held her own child like that, just so. What remained of
Angela had also been carefully wrapped in a blanket. We’ll leave you alone,
then, said the doctor, and she and the nurses exited the room. Jane’s
daughter’s upper torso was intact but cold. She had inherited Jane’s bright red
hair from some long-ago Irish ancestor. Her eyes so black you could barely see
the irises. Yes, they were open too, Jane could see herself reflected in their
dark depths. A modern Pietà. Jane did not look any place but Angela’s face,
miraculously unscathed. The doctors had been considerate. What was left of the
lower body had been tightly wrapped in hospital linens. Jane remembers
swaddling Angela as a colicky infant, wrapping the soft cotton blanket tightly
around the small, furious, kicking red body. Jane knows she should be in
sympathy with Heidi’s parents, but she isn’t. She has more in common with the
murderers. She’s killed, and then held the victim of her deed in her arms.
Somehow Jane knew this had been the case with little Heidi as well. She had
been loved to death.
About the Author
Alice LaPlante is an award-winning journalist whose
bestselling books include Half Moon Bay, A Circle of Wives, Method and
Madness—The Making of a Story, and the New York Times bestseller Turn of Mind.
She taught creative writing at Stanford University where she was a Wallace
Stegner Fellow and was in the MFA program at San Francisco State University.
She lives with her family in Mallorca, Spain.
Thanks to Alice LaPlante and Philippa Ward of Titan Books for a copy of the book and a place on the tour.
Follow the rest of the tour!
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