Why You'll Love This
A serial killer left her mother's severed hand on the police steps — and then her mother vanished instead of turning up dead.
- Great if you want: dual-timeline mysteries where past trauma reshapes the present
- The experience: steadily tightening dread with an 80s small-town atmosphere
- The writing: McMahon layers secrets carefully — revelations feel earned, not cheap
- Skip if: messy mother-daughter dynamics and unresolved grief hit too close
About This Book
Twenty-five years is a long time to grieve someone you assumed was dead. When architect Reggie's mother—a woman she'd spent decades trying to forget—suddenly resurfaces after vanishing during a serial killer's reign of terror in 1985, Reggie is forced back into the summer that broke her open: thirteen years old, friendless, and watching the town hold its breath as a killer called Neptune left his gruesome calling cards on the police department steps. The past and present collide with mounting dread as Reggie realizes the killer was never caught—and may not be finished.
McMahon structures the novel in dual timelines, weaving between Reggie's fractured adolescence and her adult reckoning with what she thought she knew. The prose is clean and propulsive, with an instinct for the specific emotional textures of childhood—the particular cruelty of feeling invisible, the desperate attachments formed in lonely summers. What gives the book its edge isn't just the mystery mechanics but the psychological weight underneath them: this is fundamentally a story about mothers and daughters, shame and survival, and the lies we tell ourselves to keep moving forward.
