Review of Raveled by Anne McAneny
5 stars
Allison Fennimore is a woman with a bitter, wry wit, and she
comes by it naturally, given her circumstances. Now a bartender in New York,
when she was fifteen her father was charged, tried, and convicted of two
killings. Even where circumstances couldn’t quite convict, the small town of
Lavitte, North Carolina, did so; and Artie Fennimore did some prison time and
then died. Allison’s older brother Kevin, deep in alcoholism, recently was
involuntarily sentenced to rehab after an accident in which an also intoxicated
adolescent, recklessly driving, died. Now Kevin wants their father’s name
cleared, or at least, the lies of Lavitte exposed; and since he is in mandatory
rehab and can’t do so himself, he wants Allison to return to Lavitte and find
out, while she’s simultaneously arranging to put their mother, suffering from
dementia, in assisted living, and sell Mother’s residence.
Author Anne McAneny has a true gift for delineating small
town life, peeling away the layers and turning over the stones that conceal the
ugly truths: a long-term Mayor with likely crime connections in New Jersey;
neighbors and other citizens who leap to convict by gossip; and the life
expectancy of rumours, which seems to be eternal. Her characters are delineated
sentence by sentence, and almost immediately, they are sufficiently realized to
be people we know or could know, not just fictional individuals drawn on a
printed page. I highly recommend this engrossing mystery.
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