Today is my stop on the blog tour for Little Falls, the raw, powerful debut novel by Elizabeth Lewes. My thanks to Emma Welton at damppebbles blog tours for inviting me onto the tour and to the publisher for my review copy.
The Blurb:
She tried to forget the horrors of war – but her quiet hometown conceals a litany of new evils.
Sergeant Camille Waresch did everything she could to forget Iraq. She went home to Eastern Washington and got a quiet job. She connected with her daughter, Sophie, whom she had left as a baby. She got sober. But the ghosts of her past were never far behind.
While conducting a routine property tax inspection on an isolated ranch, Camille discovers a teenager’s tortured corpse hanging in a dilapidated outbuilding. In a flash, her combat-related PTSD resurges – and in her dreams, the hanging boy merges with a young soldier whose eerily similar death still haunts her. The case hits home when Sophie reveals that the victim was her ex-boyfriend – and as Camille investigates, she uncovers a tangled trail that leads to his jealous younger brother and her own daughter, wild, defiant, and ensnared.
The closer Camille gets to the truth, the closer she is driven to the edge. Her home is broken into. Her truck is blown up. Evidence and witnesses she remembers clearly are erased. And when Sophie disappears, Camille’s hunt for justice becomes a hunt for her child. At a remote compound where the terrifying truth is finally revealed, Camille has one last chance to save her daughter – and redeem her own shattered soul.
Little Falls was published by Crooked Lane Books in hardcover, audio and digital formats on 11th August 2020.
Purchase Links:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Google Books
Book Depository
Barnes and Noble
My Review:
Woah! I was left thinking about this intense, hard hitting story long after I finished it, Camille herself particularly.
An army veteran and single mother, Camille Waresch now works for the County Assessor's Office making tax inspection visits to properties in the district. On a routine call one day she discovers a young man hanging dead in a barn. And that brings back a traumatic event that took place whilst she was in the army which has never really left her. Asked to make notes for the medical examiner at the current crime scene she learns more about what happened to the man immediately prior to his death and that brings back even more painful memories back for Camille. And she becomes convinced the two events are connected and determined, obsessed even, to find the truth.
Our narrator here is Camille herself and we soon learn how deeply damaged she is by events in Iraq. Clearly suffering from PTSD she is a ball of pent up emotion - mainly anger and hurt. She is always intense and alert, never relaxes, barely smiles and doesn't know how to be around the people that care about her, doesn't know how to let them in. Having been deployed for much of her daughter's life, she struggles to connect with her, struggles to be a good mother. But she does know that she must protect her daughter at all costs, and Sophie has fallen in with a bad crowd...
Camille suffers frequent flashbacks and doesn't sleep well, and as a result is an unreliable narrator. The text jumps between what is happening in the present day and events in Iraq playing out in Camille's mind - she struggles to be sure of what's real and what's not, what is now and what was then. And thus so do we. The sentences are sometimes choppy, disjointed in places, like Camille's thinking. It's an interesting technique which really works.
Whilst Camille is not necessarily easy to like and does nothing to endear herself to the reader, she's written in such a way that you can't help but be behind her, rooting for her. She is a woman who is hurting, and struggling to settle into civilian life when all she knows how to do is be a soldier. Lewes has forces experience and has clearly researched PTSD at length, and the writing is stronger for this. The scene setting is descriptive and rich - colours, sights and smells. The other characters we meet are interesting because we see them through Camille's eyes and she mostly views people in terms of threat to her or her daughter. We hear about their bad parts, mostly. But I liked Darren - he seems a decent man, trying to do a hard job but fighting a losing battle with Camille.
The story is well paced, gaining momentum as Camille investigates deeper. The tension mounts as Camille gets closer to the truth and puts herself in more and more danger. Her sanity is tested. The writing is unflinching, pulls no punches. There are some graphic descriptions of crime scenes, references to torture and drugs and with the mental health theme running all the way through, this won't be a book for everyone. But I found it a challenging, rewarding read. A powerful, intense tale of anger, pain, a fight for truth and justice and a search for redemption. Was anything resolved for Camille at the end? I'm still mulling that one over.... Happy to recommend this book.
The Author:
Thanks so much x
ReplyDeleteIt was my pleasure. x
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