Long Bright River: an intense family thriller

It's a good family based story of two sisters but does not involve a great mystery unfolding, in case, you're a fan of "edge of the seat" moments like me. Good book for dramatic readers.

Long Bright River is a compelling story of family, sisterhood, and relations, full of suspense and drama. Set In a Philadelphia neighborhood, rocked by the drug crisis, in a city where addiction and crime are now rampant. The story focuses on two sisters, Mickey, a police officer, and her sister, Kacey; an addict and prostitute, who has now drifted far away from Mickey’s life. Then Kacey disappears and at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey is in a race against time to find the culprit--and her sister--before it's too late.Long Bright River is both; a story of sisters with ties beyond blood and fate and an engrossing suspense novel focused on the search for Kacey. The story is narrated in alternating timelines; both present and the past. The story is narrated entirely from Mickey's point of view, as she recalls, in flashbacks, the girls' tragic childhoods and their story up to the present. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces begin to fit in slow and the whole picture becomes clear slowly.This is not an easy read. It highlights the rising drug crisis in working-class America and paints a bleak picture of the downward spiral of a drug addict and how it affects entire families. As a mystery, the story has many twists and turns but at its heart, it’s an emotional story. To be fair, it covers many issues like addiction, police corruption, dysfunctional families, and a crime against women but every theme is seamlessly woven through this story. Moore captures the dark and disturbing atmosphere perfectly, like an omnipresent character in the story.Liz Moore does a good job of creating every character in the book, especially Mickey. She's not always the reliable narrator either and neither is her character the most perfect. As we uncover secrets Mickey has avoided dealing with in her adult life, we discover that every character in this book is flawed and hence so human.The story was more of a slow burn than a page-turning thriller. So it may be hard to get into in the beginning. I enjoyed this book but never fully felt invested. While the twists made sense but they weren't ultimately that shocking. The mystery portion of the book did felt lacking as the primary focus is on the family drama.Overall though, Long Bright River is well-written, engaging, and moving at most times. The characters are well crafted and multidimensional. If you love thrillers and family drama, this book is for you.

Hawkins' quote on the cover of this outstanding novel says exactly what I thought when I closed the book. This is an absolutely stunning psychological crime thriller. The narrative is sharp, the characterisation authentic, the themes of addiction, poverty, and the way our familial history shapes us excellently written and believable, and the plot itself so realistic I kept forgetting I was reading fiction. It reads more like a literary thriller. I'm quite a visual reader anyway but I can really see Moore's work being adapted into a movie. This has shot straight up to my top reads of the year (2020) and it's going to take a very special book to reach anywhere near the same level.Stunning, visceral, and absorbing. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a procedural element to their psychological fiction.

Why has this book received so many plaudits? This has to be one of the biggest slogs ever, and for big reasons. Firstly, and in all seriousness, the editor who decided this was ok should be slapped with a wet fish, but why on earth has it been written without speech marks? You know? Those things that denote someone is...well... speaking? It's an absolute nightmare of having to re-read sentences time and time again to make sense of them. There is a dash before someone speaks but nothing to denote when they stop or when they start again in the same bit of dialogue. So, for example: - Is that Mickey? asks my aunt Lynn. Ashley's mother. Is that you, Mickey?Or- No, says Mrs. Mahon. She frowns. I didn't know him. I didn't tell him anything.It's a total nightmare.Also, there's not really much of a story. Mickey is a police officer and has a sister, a drug addict, who has gone missing. I didn't like Mickey much. I know a lot of authors say it's not important that we like their heroes/heroines, but if we don't like them we don't really care about them, do we? This is just 400 pages of angst, of Mickey trying to do her job, bring up her young son and search for her sister singlehandedly. I got about half way through before I decided that I couldn't care less and found reading it so, so difficult with the awful punctuation that I was almost wishing to be back in that classroom trying to decipher Chaucer!Don't waste your money.

Well, what an impactful read! This story was one that really got beneath my skin. I thought the author did a splendid job of fleshing out the main character of Micky, a female patrol officer, who walks the sometimes mean streets of Philadelphia. Micky has not had an easy life. When Mickey was only a young girl, her mother died of a drug overdose, and her estranged father became a distant memory. Mickey has a younger sister, Kacey, who has unfortunately made poor choices in life, she now works as a prostitute to feed her drug addiction. When Kacey goes missing, the local police don't invest much in the way of resources and time to investigate. So, Mickey uses her street contacts etc, in an effort to find out what's happened to her sister.The novel is written in the first person - from the viewpoint of Mickey. This gives the author the opportunity to give an excellent portrayal of Mickey, and explore the complexities of her family life. At times, it's heartbreaking to read of the wrong decisions made, the wrong things said, and the misunderstandings which lead to Mickey and Kacey heading in contrasting life-changing directions.Although I never got confused as to who was saying what, I didn't like the absence of quotation marks, that was my main reason for removing a star. I also thought the narrative was over-cooked at times. That said, this is still a strong, solid story that has been executed with skill, and provides a realistic depiction of the trials and tribulations experienced by a working-class family. In addition, we have the inclusion of drug-related issues, and an on-going mystery. This novel is definitely worth reading, and has certainly whetted my appetite for more Liz Moore books.

A verbose description of the growing up relationship of two sisters in a dysfunctional family, the younger being born when the mother was heavily on drugs. They lived in their grandmother house with her and their father when growing up after their mother died and the father was later thrown out because of his drug addiction. The older girl becomes a policewoman while the younger becomes a drug addict, living rough, is involved in prostitution and subsequently has a baby with the older sister’s boyfriend, which is adopted by the older sister, whom treats the baby as her own son. This child is precocious since at the age of four he is playing chess and the ukulele, selecting books in libraries with the mother and co-reading books such ‘Grimms Fairy Tales’. His activities and expressions are constantly described by the mother.A number of drug using young girls are murdered and the policewoman tries to find her sister who has gone missing, as she thinks she might be one of the victims. The murderer is eventually identified by the younger sister.The two sisters become reconciled after the younger gives up drugs, has a baby, and both have met their father whom they haven’t seen in over twenty years and they all live happily ever after.

Superb, loved this so much, couldn’t put it down, riveting, brilliantly written, compelling crime story, heartbreaking, hopeful, sad, very real, twisty, intelligent, such pain and loss and yet kindness, with so much in there about families, society, love, betrayal. Three books in a row from Liz Moore that I’ve thought were brilliant reads. Another that will be in my books of the year.