The Day I Died

February 6, 2017
At the start of this compelling novel of psychological suspense from Mary Higgins Clark Award–winner Rader-Day (Little Pretty Things), handwriting analyst Anna Winger agrees to assist the Parks, Ind., sheriff in the hunt for a missing child. She does so reluctantly, since she suspects that the mother was trapped in an abusive marriage and may have escaped with her young son. If that’s the case, Anna isn’t sure she wants the mother and boy found. Anna knows about living with violence—she has been hiding from her abusive boyfriend for years, ever since she learned that she was pregnant and was forced to fake her own death to escape. Anna and her now-teenage son, Joshua, have moved every few years. When Joshua goes missing, Anna must examine everything she thought she knew—and confront the demons from her past. Beautiful prose and tack-sharp observations round out this slow-burning but thought-provoking meditation on the ravages of domestic violence. Agent: Sharon Bowers, Miller Bowers Griffin Literary Management.

February 1, 2017
A handwriting analyst is forced to face her own traumatic past in Rader-Day's (Little Pretty Things, 2015, etc.) latest.Anna Winger never stays in one place for too long. Ever since she fled her violent boyfriend in order to raise her son in safety, she's become an expert at avoiding intimacy and staying off the grid. Ironically, she lives her life by drawing conclusions about others based solely on their handwriting while distancing herself from human relationships. Working as a consultant for federal and local law enforcement, Anna gets drawn into the drama when she's referred to the sheriff of Parks, Indiana, to help with a missing child case. On top of this mystery and a reluctant attraction to the sheriff, she's dealing with her 13-year-old son, Joshua, who's begun to act out and hang around with a bad crowd responsible for painting angry graffiti around town. When Joshua disappears, Anna has to return to her hometown to face the ghosts of her past and the person she used to be before she staged her own disappearance. In a rather too convenient twist, the answer to the mystery of the missing boy also lies in Anna's hometown. Though the novel builds a deeply human story of fear, error, and redemption, it's incredibly slow to get there. Anna's paranoia and loneliness, while understandable, keep her isolated from the reader as well; it takes a long time to get invested in her voice because she's so stingy with the details in the beginning. By the end, however, Anna's story carries much more weight than the problem of the missing boy. This finely layered novel succeeds more as a human-interest story than as a mystery.

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February 1, 2017
In award-winning Rader-Day's latest, the staid existence of domestic-violence survivor and handwriting analyst Anna Winger and her son, Joshua, is punctuated by periodic moves when anyone comes close to unmasking their identities. They've now settled in Parks, Indiana, a quiet town until a two-year-old boy goes missing, and Anna is hired to examine handwriting central to the case. She is compelled to find the boy, even as she's repelled by his family's dysfunction, the kind of chaos and unhappiness she ran away from years before. When things take complicated turns, it takes a visit to a past she thought she'd left behind to sort out the mess. Apart from Anna and Joshua, Rader-Day's characters are a little flat here, but the story of survival and redemption will propel readers to the end. The author notes that she was inspired to write this title by a handwriting-analysis book she found in 2007; it could be Joyce Frances Parkinson's The Ultimate Guide to Handwriting Analysis, and that or any similar guide would be a great companion to this novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2016

When handwriting expert Anna Winger is asked to evaluate a ransom note after a kidnapping in her new hometown, she wonders whether the culprit is the kidnapped child's mother, desperate to protect him from an abusive father. After all, Anna did the same. Rader-Day's The Black Hour won multiple best first novel awards, and Little Pretty Things won a Mary Higgins Clark Award.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2017

Handwriting analyst Anna Winger has been on the run for 13 years, after fleeing with her unborn son from an abusive relationship. Shortly after moving to Parks, IN, she is called in to examine a ransom note connected to a missing boy and his dead nanny. She can't help but sympathize with the boy's mother, the presumed kidnapper, because she sees glimpses of her own former life after meeting the boy's volatile father. Facing skepticism from the sheriff's office and a case that hits too close to home, Anna can't help but investigate well beyond her normal involvement. When her own son disappears and her personal life starts to crumble, Anna has to balance her longstanding desire for privacy with her need for help in order to get him back. Only by coming to terms with her own dark past will she be able to find her son, and possibly the missing boy, too. Handwriting analysis offers an unusual angle to this absorbing novel, and Anna's strong powers of observation add dimension to the tension-filled narrative. VERDICT Mary Higgins Clark Award winner Rader-Day's (Little Pretty Things) third novel will thrill readers who can't get enough of the psychological suspense genre. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]--Emily Byers, Salem P.L., OR

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.