Will history, once again, help them solve the case?
It only took a few chapters for this story’s mysteries to sink their teeth into me. The combination of the spooky old photos of a dead boy and Ree’s bizarre behavior was nerve-racking. It amazes me how Margaret Peterson Haddix was once again able to intertwine a mystery from the past and a mystery in the present into one story.
Ree is clearly hiding something. When the secret was revealed, it wasn’t as alarming as I thought it would be. Parts of it were still messed up but not in an awful way. There’s not much else I can say about Ree without giving too much of the story away.
However, I can talk about Ree’s grandmother, Halcyon Lester. She worked at a funeral home and later became a funeral director back when men thought women were too delicate to handle death. Quoting Grandma Hal, “All the men said there’d never be a female funeral director because, you know, we’d be too hysterical about it. And faced with a corpse we needed to embalm, what would we do but cry and scream? It’s like those man didn’t even remember whose shoulder they cried on when they had to. They didn’t remember who cleaned up after them all the time. They didn’t remember if we ladies can handle giving birth, we can surely handle ushering a body into the ground. It’s a lot harder to keep a newborn alive than to get a corpse to stay dead.”
That last sentence made me fall in love with this character.
Sadly, Grandma Hal has dementia. Dementia is ‘a cruel and horrible disease,’ sad for the recipient and for those around them. There was one part where the grandmother’s mind seemed to travel back in time to when she was a kid. Dementia is a tough subject and Margaret Peterson Haddix does a wonderful job addressing it.
Thankfully, Colin and Nevaeh have just enough summer left for one more mystery. I was hoping this would be a five-book series, but I can live with three. In the end, it is hinted what present-day mystery Colin and Nevaeh will be trying to solve. I can’t wait to see what past mystery they will solve alongside it.