“It was a hell of a plan. On paper.”

65. Green Lake – S.K. Epperson

I realized that at the end of this book Madeline was living what is technically my absolute nightmare without the emotional involvement, and yet, for her, I was in support.

She’s the bread winner after her husband gets laid off from his job and takes it like a whiny kid – he won’t take any other kind of job, he won’t make any effort to help himself, he just keeps acting like his ego is the most important thing that has ever been injured. He kills himself when she decides to leave. Of course, besides this, his family blames her, one of her jackass students also somehow knows and blames her, she had a traumatic experience in her anthropology field work, and she’s feeling quite done with the world around her. Thankfully, her sister offers her their cabin. She and her husband only come up on weekends, it’s surrounded by weirdos, and one seriously taciturn conservation officer lives next door; she can live rent free and write for those grants so she could maybe go back into the field? It seemed like a good plan on paper. But, as any woman living alone knows, there are folk who think you’re a threat or their potential property because you are “unclaimed” and not hideous. It’s especially bad if you’re smart, as Madeline well knows and experiences.

And as usual with S.K. Epperson, there’s some scary, scary happenings around. The brutal kind. Fully realized humans doing what makes them feel powerful and very sad animals (there’s usually some kind of animal violence in her books, which is just a warning) and in this one, a lot of digging. Very suspicious digging.

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Thorfinnur’s ready for field work, suspicious digging, whatever you’ve got.