Slip by Michael Pogach

Slip by Michael Pogach

This is an interesting mystery about a young woman (Byron) who returns home to claim her estate when her estranged father dies. Right from moment one, things in her hometown are odd. Her father’s best friend and executor is a special kind of jerk who appears to enjoy needling (in an unkind way) his friend’s daughter. He also appears to be the major beneficiary of the will and even though much that is left in the house is Byron’s, he insists on having her visits chaperoned.

 

Byron, however, is not interested in her inheritance so much as she’s interested in trying to learn more about her dead mother. Except…she begins to uncover evidence that her mother didn’t die when her father says she did and appears to have committed herself to an insane asylum. What’s more, she finally figures out that her best friend growing up (the only person in town she stayed in touch with) is missing. She tries to investigate her friend’s disappearance on top of trying to figure out what happened to her mom and (unsurprisingly for a mystery of this nature) the two things might be connected despite being some 25 or so years separated in time.

 

The actual mystery is frankly very good. The big weakness in the novel is Byron, herself. While it is easy to sympathize with her frustrations and her desire to learn what happened, she herself is not very likable. Her bitterness over her past is understandable, but coupled with her utter stupidity, I never warmed to her as a heroine. The huge chip on her shoulder is too big an obstacle to overcome.

 

I should also mention that Byron has a minor psychic power to occasionally catch glimpses of the past or future. It’s not enough to make this feel like a genuinely paranormal book, but it is enough to let the author fill in some details of the past that he probably couldn’t have told us any other way.