Liz Moore’s Long Dark River starts out with such promise. It opens with a captivating premise and mystery. Two sisters (Mickey and Kasey) – one a police officer and one an opioid addict working and living the same streets. Kasey goes missing, there is a serial killer on the loose, and Mickey tries to find Kasey to keep her safe (or at least that’s what we think at the start).
And this plot carries us for the first half of the book and it is wrenching to hold the two parallel lives at once in our minds (what when wrong? how did the sisters end up estranged?). At some points Mickey forces the question of what did Kasey do wrong to end up living the life she is living and not the moral one that Mickey does – and I find this point irritating, for nothing about addiction suggests choice and in the framing of the question there is (at least at first) the idea that there is some kind of moral failing on Kasey’s part. Later in the book this question is – really far too patly and again with some kind of pinning of individual blame – explained in that their mother was in the throws of her own addiction when she was pregnant with Kasey, and so Kasey was born addicted herself. The whole thing makes it as though opioid addiction is an individual failing made by individual choice. And if there’s one thing we took from the utterly brilliant Demon Copperhead it is that this mess is not the fault of the individual user.
I digress. So halfway through when some of the questions about Kasey are resolved, the book turns – instead of to a conclusion that might be complex and nuanced about the sisters and their relationship (which is, I think, what the book is best about) to instead solving the murder mystery element. Like we care who the serial killer is? I guess we’re supposed to care who the serial killer is. And so we have to work our way through the plot structure of a Law and Order episode to chase some red herrings and eventually find the killer. It was all just so bizarrely beside the point to (what this reader saw as) the heart of the story: the relationship between Kasey and Mickey.
So I’m not sure I’d recommend it. I mean I did recommend it to a bunch of people (sorry M.) when I first started reading it because I was so taken with the family dynamic and some of the writing is Not Bad. But by the end I was sort of embarrassed to have suggested it because it becomes some other kind of book. Maybe if you go into it expecting that turn you’ll enjoy it the whole way through. You let me know.
Literary Vice 