Atria
July 22, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Isolated places are always a good site for a mystery. In this case, the characters are assembled on an island off the coast of New England where, years earlier, a girl disappeared. An awkward loner, Henry, was suspected by the islanders of her murder, but no hard evidence tied him to the crime. Now he lives as a hermit on a rock off the island in a crumbling house he built for himself and his wife, obsessively watching Hadley Island’s residents remotely through a telescope while avoiding them in person. Orla O’Connor, the best friend of the long-missing girl, has returned to clear out her childhood home after her career as an artist ran off the rails. And newcomer Faith has arrived to spend the summer with her fabulously wealthy boyfriend at his family mansion. All three of these lives tangle together when another girl goes missing and rumors begin to swirl.
Each of the three main players has secrets and a false facade of sorts. Henry is in denial that his obsession is unhealthy and that his house is becoming unlivable, just as he realizes his isolation won’t protect him from those who think he’s guilty of yet another abduction. Orla is nursing the hurt of excoriating reviews from her latest art show while pondering the relationship she had with her best friend and the boy she was infatuated with. Faith, the outsider, finds herself isolated in a vast mansion, neglected by her boyfriend, wondering if the proposal she’s anticipating will ever come, and beginning to doubt that the life among the rich and famous is really what she wants after scheming for years to show up in the right places, wearing the right clothes, pretending to belong despite her working-class past.
Their secrets and self-delusions are gradually revealed with several twists and turns as the pace accelerates and the stories are knotted together in a cinematic denouement that is both predictable and dependent on reveals that don’t entirely jibe with the characters’ motives but are necessary for the plot.
The benefit of setting a story in an isolated, insular place is that it can be developed without the quotidian world interfering, but it also means the story doesn’t feel anchored in the real world; it’s a set of characters – nicely rounded out, in this case – placed under a glass dome and given a conflict to watch them circle and collide. The result is a beach read that has enough complexity in the characters to be interesting and a plot that, once the mystery is revealed and the characters’ stories are wound up, can be set aside with a satisfied sigh and quickly forgotten.