The Fate of Katherine Carr

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George Gates used to be a travel writer who specialized in places where people disappeared—Judge Crater, the Lost Colony.Then his eight-year-old son was murdered, the killer never found, and Gates gave up disappearance. Now he writes stories of redemptive triviality about flower festivals and local celebrities for the town paper, and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son’s last day. Enter Arlo MacBride, a retired missing-persons detective still obsessed with the unsolved case of Katherine Carr. When he gives Gates the story she left behind—a story of a man stalking a woman named Katherine Carr—Gates too is drawn inexorably into a search for the missing author’s brief life and uncertain fate. And as he goes deeper, he begins to suspect that her tale holds the key not only to her fate, but to his own. From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. George Gates, who once toured the world as a travel writer, churns out fluff pieces for his local paper and spends his nights alone, imagining what he'd do to the person who murdered his eight-year-old son seven years before and is still at large in Cook's eerily poignant novel. When Arlo McBride, a retired missing persons detective, tells Gates about the unsolved disappearance of reclusive poet Katherine Carr 20 years earlier, Gates is intrigued. Cook (Master of the Delta) seamlessly intertwines the short story Carr left behind—about a woman also named Katherine Carr—with Gates's growing obsession with Carr's fate. When his editor suggests that Gates write a profile of Alice Barrows, an orphan girl dying of progeria (premature aging), he discovers that Alice is an avid detective fan, and together they form an unlikely partnership. Adept at merging past and present plot lines, Cook eloquently examines the often cathartic act of storytelling. Author tour. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistCook, the author of 21 novels, has been nominated for the Edgar seven times and won once (for The Chatham School Affair, 1996). His latest is as much an investigation into character as it is a cold-case mystery. Hero George Gates has been completely broken by the kidnapping and murder of his eight-year-old son seven years ago. Gates is a former travel writer, much given to writing about places where people disappeared. Now he salves his psyche by writing totally innocuous small features for the local paper. A chance meeting at a bar with the detective who organized the search parties when Gates’ son went missing leads Gates into a new interest, a cold case that has obsessed the detective for two decades. Retired missing-persons detective Arlo McBride shows Gates the poems and journal that the 31-year-old missing woman left behind, and both men are pulled into reopening the case. The action tends to crawl, but the characters are rich and fascinating. Give this one to fans of Kate Atkinson’s acclaimed When Will There Be Good News? (2008). --Connie Fletcher