A young woman, Dahlia Everston, is found dead, her body drained of blood, in this delicate, almost poetic mystery set in south central Missouri. Estill keeps you guessing whodunit, but really the story is not about Dahlia so much as how her death affects those who knew her, in particular three women: Dahlia’s stepmother, Norah, also the mother of a “slow” teenage boy, Timothy; Patti Callahan, the sheriff’s deputy who seems to do most of the department’s sleuthing, particularly where crimes against women are involved; and Sandra (“Sand”) Williams, a character who got an education and eagerly left the Ozarks behind for a complicated, professional career. Seeking respite, she now lives with her husband, Frank (who’s mostly absent) in a cabin on Seven Point River that she inherited from her father.
Sand and Norah instinctively dislike each other. Norah is a fundamentalist of a particularly muleheaded sort, regarding anyone outside the church as freethinking and wicked, and that’s the very sort of person Sand, with her liberal, feminist notions, is bound to despise. Nonetheless, the two are neighbors, and Norah asks Sand to look in on Dahlia and Timothy while she and her husband take a vacation. Sand finds Dahlia’s body and feels guilty thereafter, her guilt enhanced because she hadn’t wanted Norah’s chore, and perhaps postponed it a little too long.
Norah goes off the rails, hugging her retarded, judgmental son suffocatingly near, driving her grief-stricken husband away, eventually growing so glum and hysterical she accuses Sand of the murder. It’s left to Patti, a sort of good ole gal with a difficult romantic life, to apply reason to the scene, and in the process bring into the 21st Century this rural county’s attitudes toward sexual assault. Several suspects present themselves, one of them in California; eliminating this particular unsavory character narrows the investigation—and solves an old mystery. The matter of the body drained of blood is illuminated—phosphorescently speaking—with an intriguing luminol test, in which Estill proves her police procedural chops. The luminol test also narrows the list of suspects.
In the end, all three women are transformed into smarter, more sympathetic people. Everyone seems older, more sorrowful, but there’s a note of hope. And yes, the murderer is revealed.
Down along the Piney 