People say you can’t go home again. Whether “home” is represented by an ever-evolving city, a remote village, or a figurative place of comfort, it’s sure to be different now than it once was. In mysteries and thrillers, the experience of going home again can be emotional, revelatory, and even downright dangerous—especially when dead bodies are involved.
This is certainly the case in The Dead Season, which finds Senior Investigator Shana Merchant returning to her hometown of Swanton, Vermont upon learning her estranged uncle is the victim of homicide. Her reluctance to reconnect with her broken and embittered kin isn’t the only challenge Shana needs to overcome. When she discovers a link between her uncle’s murder and the serial killer she’s been hunting for more than a year, home isn’t nearly as safe as it used to be.
Homecomings feature in a number of mysteries and thrillers, perhaps because of the polarity between safety and danger, or vulnerability and forces of external strength. Whether a protagonist longs for the home they once knew or would do anything to avoid it, the experience of going back enables writers to create conflict and explore their characters’ growth.
Here are a few crime fiction novels that rely on home as a major theme.
Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier
Georgina (Geo) Shaw’s homecoming is hard-earned; she’s just spent the past five years in prison. Now, she’s moving back home with her father, to the same neighborhood where her high school friend and cheerleading teammate Angela Wong lost her life.
This story is a homecoming of sorts for Detective Kaiser Brody, too. Fourteen years ago, his high school classmate Angela Wong was brutalized and murdered, a crime in which their mutual friend Georgina played a part. Now that Georgina’s back, the Sweetbay Strangler is, too—and the body count in the woods is rising.
For Geo, returning home means confronting her friend’s murder all over again. And yet, she has nowhere else to go. Jennifer Hillier’s portrayal of Geo’s internal dread make this complicated character’s prison days seem like a cakewalk. It’s her guilt, and her relationship to a ruthless serial killer, that threatens to do her in.
Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day
Teenage rivalries live and die in high school, but ten years after graduation, Juliet Townsend still envies her old friend and track teammate Madeleine Bell. In Little Pretty Things, though, it isn’t the protagonist who comes home. Juliet has been there all along, stuck at a dead-end job at a one-star motel while Maddy lives an enviable life in Chicago. When Maddy reappears in town, supposedly passing through for just one night, all Juliet can think about is how she’s never been able to keep pace.
All of that changes when Maddy turns up dead and the local police suspect Juliet in her murder.
Set off against Maddy’s success, Juliet’s gloomy small-town existence plays beautifully as she tries to right the egregious wrong she discovers while investigating Maddy’s death.
The Long Way Home by Louise Penny
The 10th book in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series of mysteries finds Gamache, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and villagers Clara Morrow and Myrna travelling away from their home in an effort to recover Clara’s “sin-sick” artist husband and return him safely to Three Pines. Eclipsed by his wife’s fame, which has driven a wedge between the couple, Peter Morrow flees to the wilds of Northern Quebec, but both Gamache and Clara fear his efforts to self-exile may have deadly results.
This is a book that dissects the notion of what “home” means to different people. For Peter Morrow, home isn’t just Three Pines. Rather, it’s his wife, whom he wishes to return to, and who wants nothing more than to right their life together.
The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
The death of Margot Lee’s mother, Mina, is upsetting enough without an accompanying mystery, but that’s exactly what Margot gets when, after returning to L.A.’s Koreatown, she starts to question whether it was an accident.
Margot is compelled to investigate her mother’s personal life, and ends up delving into Mina’s past—her nebulous time in Korea, and her early days in L.A. Margot learns that several of the people her mother met in Koreatown had a major impact on both Mina and Margot’s lives.
The dual timelines in this absorbing story speak to the secrets our parents keep. Mina Lee did such an effective job of concealing her personal history that Margot doesn’t even know her own father. In this rich and layered story, going home again is a wholly transformative experience: it changes the way Margot sees both her own life and that of her mother’s.
The Dry by Jane Harper
In Jane Harper’s The Dry, federal agent Aaron Falk does manage to go home again. What he finds there, however, is far from comforting.
Falk hasn’t felt welcome in Kiewarra since before he was a teenager, when he was blamed for the death of a local. Upon learning his old friend has died in a horrific murder-suicide, he’s drawn back to the drought-ridden Australian town and takes it upon himself to help solve the crime.
Falk’s history with the killer, his guilt over that long-ago death, and his charged relationship with the people of Kiewarra all weigh on him. “You’re staring so hard at the past that it’s blinding you,” Falk is told. At the same time, he must confront it if he hopes to makes things right in the place he once called home. This is a mystery that’s tender and thrilling at once.
The Homecoming by Andrew Pyper
Most homecomings have as much to do with family as with place. When that family is highly dysfunctional and the place is straight out of The Twilight Zone, you know things are bound to be interesting.
In The Homecoming, a forced family reunion incited by the death of an absentee father catches the Quinlans completely off guard. Raymond Quinlan’s last will and testament states that his family must remain on the property of his secluded estate for thirty days in order to reap his unexpected wealth.
It’s an opportunity for the Quinlans to learn more about the mysterious man and his life beyond his family. Trouble is, the secrets he’s been harboring are hazardous and put his family into twisted situations the likes of which they could never have imagined.
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