the blackbird season
and the complicated
interactions among
peers in a small
town, be they
teenagers or adults.
In typical Moretti
fashion, she provides
Kate Moretti
both fact and fiction, springs to life
Moretti’s descriptions bring people and in the form of Bill Price, a kind of
places alive, immersing the reader in each
character’s experience, and her pacing everyman who’s already lost his wife
to tragedy when his daughter
keeps one engaged. While categorized as
suspense, based on the girl’s disappears. Once she’s found,
nearly beaten to death, it opens the
disappearance and the question of who is doors to terrible truths Price never
responsible, it’s really more of a study of
the complexities, expectations, and imagined he’d have to face, as he’s
left to confront the reality of much
disappointments of personal relationships.
It also does a good job of exploring the of what he held dear has been a lie.
Like Lisa Gardner and Harlan
tragic outcomes that can result from the Coben, Bell imagines a suburban
loss of a small town’s main source of
employment––in this case the local paper world where no one really knows
what’s happening behind all those
mill that once meant prosperity but now
sits in ruin, abandoned and dangerous. drawn blinds. In Bell’s take,
though, even the people inside
The whodunit aspect takes a back seat to don’t really know what’s happening.
finding out how the main characters will
fare when all is said and done. That’s where his brilliance, and the
brilliance of Bring Her Home, rests.
~Rosemary Fifield, TopShelf Reviews
drama about marriage, fidelity, teacher-
student relationships,
girl disappears altogether, it gets worse.
Kate Moretti gives us front-row seats to a
REVIEWS
MORETTI’S CHARACTERS
& PLACES COME ALIVE!
reviews
~Jon Land, TopShelf Reviews
bring her home
DAVID BELL WRITES SO
WELL ... BRILLIANT!
complex, nuanced
characters whom we
get to know well and whose flaws make
them all the more real and relatable.
Alecia and Nate already have a stressful
David Bell writes so well that even the
dark world he creates in Bring Her Home
(Berkley, $16.00, 464 pages) shines
under the light of
his talent for
marriage. Her days are totally consumed
by her obsession with their autistic five-
year-old, while Nate is closely––some
bringing the seedy
side of small town
might say excessively––involved with the
high school students he teaches and
America to life.
That unsavory
underbelly people
coaches. When one of the students claims
that she and Nate are having an affair,
things begin to fall apart, and when the
www.TopShelfMagazine.net
David Bell
love to pretend
doesn’t exist, in
TOPShelf magazine
OCTOBER2017 27