What’s the Best Book You Read This Summer?

I recently refrained from following the examples of Amazon, CrimeReads, and Book Depository, all of which put together lists of what they insisted were the best new crime, mystery, and thriller novels published during the first six months of 2022. I simply didn’t think I had read enough of those releases yet to make a proper judgment. However, as we enter this summer’s final weeks (fall begins officially on September 22), I’m far less reticent to identify the book I most enjoyed over these last three balmy months.

I hope you’ll be equally willing to share your own favorites.

While there are several alluring summer titles still awaiting my attention, I am prepared already to give special kudos to Shelley Burr’s WAKE, which is due out next week from U.S. publisher William Morrow. Set amid a declining community in Central New South Wales, Australia, this modern tale first came to my attention by winning the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger award in 2019. Its plotline is not altogether unique, but Burr—who grew up around Australian sheep farmers and now works at the Department of Agriculture, Water, and the Environment in Canberra—lards her yarn with enough raw disappointments, mental traumas, tension, twists, and obstinacy in the face of ridiculously long odds, that you can be forgiven any reticence to put it down when other responsibilities call.

Nannine is a former outback boomtown, currently reduced to a proliferation of padlocked storefronts and a minimum of essential businesses. Its stockyards and sheep stations were long ago peddled to multinational corporations or abandoned to the corrosive advances of wind and time. It’s a wonder the place even bothers to exist anymore; as Burr remarks, “its primary industry now was stubbornness.” Had Nannine not been the site of a pretty schoogirl’s still-enigmatic disappearance 19 years back, chances are nobody would remember its name.

It’s in that town we find Wilhelmina “Mina” McCreery, the semi-reclusive, late-20s twin sister of Evelyn McCreery, who was supposedly snatched from their shared bedroom all those years ago without waking Mina or raising alarms elsewhere in the house. The mystery has since become fodder for Internet forums, where lonely people in their pajamas theorize endlessly about the crime, one persistent hypothesis being that Mina did in her sister. (There’s even an acronym, usually applied to such crackpot conspiracists, that at once recognizes Mina’s “rather striking resemblance to Christina Ricci’s Wednesday [Addams]” in the 1993 film Addams Family Values, and pins her as the killer: WAKE, or “Wednesday Addams Killed Evie.”) Beverley McCreery, the girls’ mother, had been Evelyn’s fierce advocate, appearing on TV news programs and writing a book about the case, trying in all ways to keep the public—and the police—interested in solving her daughter’s abduction. After Beverley’s own death a few years ago, Mina shied away from stepping in as substitute champion, and her silence has only fueled suspicions of her involvement in Evelyn’s fate.

Mina wants simply to be left unmolested on her family’s remote old farm. The last thing she desires is for some ambitious private investigator to come snooping around, looking to open old wounds in pursuit of the $2 million reward for closing Evelyn’s case. But Lane Holland needs that money (he has a younger sister to support through college), and he could use the publicity. Once a rising law-enforcement star, he has since specialized in locating missing persons—with varying degrees of success. Holland believes he can find clues in Evelyn’s vanishing that have eluded other detectives. Of course, he’ll require Mina’s cooperation to accomplish that, and she doesn’t seem inclined to give it. Not initially, anyway. Holland, though, perseveres and slowly gains her trust, in part by helping a friend of Mina’s to locate her own missing sibling.

(Left) Author Shelley Burr.

While Holland struggles to crack the conundrums surrounding young Evelyn, he and Mina—whose life has been overshadowed by her sister’s death, and whose loneliness has become a species of security—establish a hesitant closeness. But the gumshoe is concealing his real intent in identifying the 9-year-old’s kidnapper. As his obsession with this puzzle grows, he takes risks that lead both he and Mina into danger … and unearth answers neither ever expected.

Author Burr is adroit in dribbling out bits of the McCreery twins’ dark back story as WAKE speeds along, withholding just enough to fuel several genuine surprises at the end. Her complex portrayal of Mina as at once fearful and pugnacious, a lifelong patient of counselors unable to fathom her contradictions, leaves the reader wondering throughout: Is she actually the victim of loony speculations involving her sister’s demise, or the unrecognized architect of her clan’s sorrow? Burr’s rendering of Lane Holland is less subtle; yet she executes his evolutionary (or devolutionary?) arc from would-be hero to, well, something rather less virtuous without excessive loss of credibility. And her descriptions of the Australian outback—with its red-dirt roadways, water-starved trees, and distances measured by the number of beers that can be consumed along the way, instead of miles—are no less vivid than those offered by Jane Harper in 2017’s The Dry.

For a debut novel, WAKE is a remarkable achievement—not perfect (the pacing does lurch every now and then), but perfect enough to pack along on a summer getaway. I flew through its pages over a mid-week escape to a lakeside bed-and-breakfast near Seattle.

So what book—new or not-so-much—have you read over this season that really stuck with you, and that you’ll be recommending to friends for months to come? Please let us all know by dropping a note into the Comments section at the end of this post.

READ MORE: “For Canberra Author Shelley Burr, Grief and Families Are a Complicated Mix,” by Amy Walters (The Canberra Times).