Atlantic Crime
Published March 3, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Ada is fascinated by caves. Her friend Ruby’s husband Leo is, too. When exploring a series of caves under Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga in 1928, he discovers a massive waterfall that he names after his wife. He sets about developing it as a tourist attraction, building a castle and constructing an elevator to take visitors to the falls and deeper, to another series of caverns and crawl spaces. After her first visit, Ada finds herself so drawn to the underground world, she starts sneaking in to explore on our own. After the Great Depression puts a dent in business, Leo concocts a scheme to bring a “mind reader” to the caves in a stunt that should bring journalists and press attention, hopefully turning into more ticket sales. He doesn’t expect the event to turn his geologic wonder into a crime scene.
The celebrated mind reader will use his unusual skills to locate a hatpin planted somewhere in the caves by two men who will hide the pin and then accompany him as he susses out its location. A small group, including a Chicago journalist, the mind reader, his agent and his wife, and the pair who went ahead to conceal the pin, sets out. Though they don’t know it, so do Ada and a seasoned guide, Quinton, sent by Leo to trail behind them in case of an accident. They all descend to the lower level where the mind reader struggles to locate the hidden pin and plunges deeper and deeper into the cave system, spending hours that might exhaust their headlamps and flashlights. And then one of them is discovered dead, stabbed through the throat with a stalactite. Ada and Quinton need to lead the group to safety through a series of challenging crevices and caverns before they are stranded in the dark, but the dark isn’t the only thing to fear. One of them is murderer.
This sounds like a mashup of an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery with a survival thriller, but Phillips doesn’t lean into either of those genres. She’s more interested in the interactions of Ada with the other characters in a setting of surpassing beauty that happens also to be dangerous. There is a murder mystery, and there is physical risk, but none of it is tired or predictable.
The underground world speaks to Ada, and her efforts to rescue the mind reader and his ragged band of fellow explorers teaches her something about “the crooks and crevices inside a person.” There’s something raw and elemental about them as they are reduced by fear and exhaustion, “each one of them a mountain with a thousand rooms inside, some unmappable.” As she figures out who among them is a killer, she has become something of a mind reader herself.