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Summary
Summary
Journalist Lola Wicks discovers a story she can't resist...but it could be her last
When former foreign correspondent Lola Wicks heads to Wyoming for a Yellowstone vacation, she comes across a story that hits close to her past. One Wyoming soldier returning from Afghanistan commits suicide, two others spark a near-fatal brawl, and a woman is terrorized. Lola, accompanied by her young daughter, senses a story about whatever happened on the far side of the world that these troops have so disastrously brought home. But she soon realizes that getting the story must take second place to getting herself--and her little girl--out of Wyoming alive.
Praise:
"A gutsy series."--The New York Times
"A gut-wrenching mystery/thriller that explores prejudice and the incredible stress on soldiers in a seemingly unending war with no clear goals."--Kirkus Reviews
"A hallmark of the Lola Wicks series is Florio's seamless weaving of Native American communities into the narrative. The culture of the Blackfeet in Montana and North Dakota, the Shoshone in Wyoming, both on and off the reservation, come poignantly alive in characters."--Montana Standard
"It is the issues and ideas that [Florio] explores that got me invested in this novel . . . an entertaining read."--Missoulian
"A story that is gratifyingly real."--Missoula Independent
"Even as Disgracedpinpoints our political reality it never sacrifices its suspense."--Bozeman Daily Chronicle
"Lola Wicks is back and better than ever."--Montana Quarterly
"With the chops of a world-class journalist and an unsurpassed knowledge of the Rocky Mountain West, Gwen Florio weaves a compelling tapestry that combines family saga, social consciousness and human frailty, making Disgraceddifficult to put down."--Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries, the basis for the hit Netflix dramaLongmire
"Gwen Florio achieves what few others can in the field of crime fiction. She creates characters with real depth and places them in a story that is so hard-hitting and believable, it's easy to imagine it being in tomorrow's headlines."--J.J. Hensley, award-winning author of Resolveand Measure Twice
Author Notes
Gwen Florio(Missoula, MT) has won several journalism awards and been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize. Her fiction has won the inaugural Pinckley Prize and the High Plains Book Award and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her Short Fiction. She is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and Women Writing the West.
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
A favor for a friend leads a reporter to a stunning story and life-altering decisions. Lola Wicks has buried some shattering experiences in Afghanistan deep within her psyche as she rebuilds her life as a reporter in Magpie, a small Montana town. During her furlough, she's taken her 5-year-old daughter, Maggie, and their border collie, Bub, on a Wyoming vacation while she ponders whether to marry Maggie's father, part-American Indian Sheriff Charles Laurendeau. Lola's Magpie reporter friend, Jan, has asked her to pick up her cousin Palomino Jones, who's just returning from Afghanistan, at the Casper airport. When a shot is fired, Lola hits the floor with Maggie. When the dust clears, she can't help smelling a story in the airport suicide. Why did Cody Dillon, a returning soldier from the same group as Pal, kill himself in such a public place? Returning Pal to her home, she finds Jan's cousin, who sports hacked-off hair and filthy clothes, uncommunicative and hostile and probably suffering from PTSD. Lola meets Pal's Shoshone neighbor, Delbert St. Clair, whose grandson Mike, Pal's childhood friend, was one of a local group including Cody who all enlisted and went to Afghanistan together. When two other members of the group nearly kill a man in a bar fight, Lola decides to interview the returning heroes and research their backgrounds. The story goes that Mike fell asleep on watch when their vehicle broke down and was killed by an insurgent whom the rest of the group shot to death. There are many versions of that story; are any of them near the truth? The locals, prejudiced against Native Americans, are all too ready to pronounce Mike guilty of dereliction and Lola of sluttish behavior. Ignoring Charlie's ever more urgent calls to come home, the reckless heroine resolves to find the truth even if she puts herself and her child in mortal danger. Lola's third (Dakota, 2014, etc.) is a gut-wrenching mystery/thriller that explores prejudice and the incredible stress on soldiers in a seemingly unending war with no clear goals. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
"YESTERDAY I TRIED to kill myself." That sour sneer of a voice belongs to Bernie Gunther, the Prussian homicide cop who survived World War II as the house detective at Berlin's fashionable Adlon Hotel. The war has been over for more than 10 years in Philip Kerr's new book, THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27). Bernie is currently a concierge at the Grand Hôtel du Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, just another "deracinated wanted man living quietly and under a false name," like so many other expat denizens of the French Riviera. He even has a wonderful cover story for anyone impolite enough to ask how he spent the war - as a captain in the army "Catering Corps," he swears. Bernie's skill as a bridge player is all that keeps him sane in these stultifying surroundings. It's a harmless pastime, he thinks, this hushed ceremony, "the perfect game for people who have something to hide." That tranquillity is compromised when Anne French, an English writer scheming to become W. Somerset Maugham's biographer, asks Bernie to teach her to play bridge so she can attend the cutthroat games that the aging author hosts at his fabulous Villa Mauresque. But it's Bernie's bridge game that wins over Maugham, who has played with great wits like Dorothy Parker and appreciates an intellectual sourpuss. "You're bitter. I like that," he observes of Bernie. "Bitter and maudlin. I like that, too." After declaring his visitor "an even bigger cynic than I am," he invites him to join his bridge group and, incidentally, to deal with his latest blackmailer. The closeted Maugham is accustomed to buying off indiscreet playmates. But this new threat focuses on pool parties at Villa Mauresque with those infamous Cambridge spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, whose recorded testimony could damage the author's career. The intricacies of the plot, partly based on Maugham's history as a British spy in charge of a team of secret agents, make this one of Kerr's best technical efforts. But it's the characterization of Maugham and the sound of his voice - "It's just too awful to be blackmailed by a chap who goes to the same shoemaker as oneself" - that makes this novel memorable. INSPECTOR AMAIA SALAZAR, the Spanish detective in Dolores Redondo's challenging procedural THE INVISIBLE GUARDIAN (Atria, $24.99), is stumped. Teenage girls from the town of Elizondo are being killed in "some kind of macabre purification rite" and their bodies provocatively posed by the river that carves its path through the town. Whenever she's baffled, the homicide detective tends to seek inspiration in church or from the tarot cards. This being Basque Country, where "what is now considered mythology was originally a religion," Amaia does both. Having grown up an unhappy child in Elizondo, Amaia is familiar with the pagan beliefs of the region. People are respectful of Mari, the nature goddess, "powerful, capricious and terrible," and grateful for the Basajaunak, hairy trolls that protect the enchanted woods. Redondo tells the ancient tales in a hypnotic voice, while overseeing Amaia's efforts to lead a scientific criminal investigation without being dragged back into the dark forest she thought she had escaped. AS A JOURNALIST, Gwen Florio filed stories from active war zones. As an author, she confers that experience on Lola Wicks, the protagonist of a gutsy series set mostly in Montana, where Lola relocated after being downsized from her newspaper job back East, DISGRACED (Midnight Ink, paper, $14.99) finds Lola in Casper, Wyo., picking up Palomino Jones, a soldier returning from Afghanistan. But no sooner does Pal's military transport land than one of the vets blows his brains out on the tarmac. That night, two other soldiers pick a fight in a bar and put a man in intensive care. And then Pal turns out to have a full-blown case of PTSD. "This would be the part where people questioned the wisdom of a faraway war that took their healthy children and returned them broken," Lola says. "But this was the rural West, with its staunch and unquestioning patriotism." In these parts, all the local boys who made it home are "heroes," and only a cynical reporter would question their sanitized war stories and wonder what really happened over there. MAISIE DOBBS HAS found herself another war - just what Jacqueline Winspear's detective needs to perk up after some horrid personal losses and professional setbacks. In JOURNEY TO MUNICH (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99), the year is 1938 and Maisie is back home in London after volunteering as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War. As a trained psychologist, she knows the deaths of her husband and their unborn child have left her emotionally vulnerable. But it takes a brusque request from the Secret Service to give her new purpose. Leon Donat, an elderly engineer of great importance to the war effort, is imprisoned in Dachau and only his daughter can claim him. But with the daughter in ill health, only a clever female operative could travel alone to Germany, impersonate the daughter and lead Donat to freedom. So far, soso. But by giving Maisie a secondary assignment to find a runaway socialite, Winspear throws in a sizzling subplot about well-born young women who are whooping it up in Germany. Kit Kat Klub, anyone?
