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Long Bright River
Cover of Long Bright River
Long Bright River
A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)
by Liz Moore
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, PARADE, REAL SIMPLE, and BUZZFEED

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK


"[Moore’s] careful balance of the hard-bitten with the heartfelt is what elevates Long Bright River from entertaining page-turner to a book that makes you want to call someone you love.” – The New York Times Book Review
 
"This is police procedural and a thriller par excellence, one in which the city of Philadelphia itself is a character (think Boston and Mystic River). But it’s also a literary tale narrated by a strong woman with a richly drawn personal life – powerful and genre-defying.” – People
 
"A thoughtful, powerful novel by a writer who displays enormous compassion for her characters. Long Bright River is an outstanding crime novel… I absolutely loved it."
—Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then one of them goes missing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.
Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit—and her sister—before it's too late.
Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, PARADE, REAL SIMPLE, and BUZZFEED

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK


"[Moore’s] careful balance of the hard-bitten with the heartfelt is what elevates Long Bright River from entertaining page-turner to a book that makes you want to call someone you love.” – The New York Times Book Review
 
"This is police procedural and a thriller par excellence, one in which the city of Philadelphia itself is a character (think Boston and Mystic River). But it’s also a literary tale narrated by a strong woman with a richly drawn personal life – powerful and genre-defying.” – People
 
"A thoughtful, powerful novel by a writer who displays enormous compassion for her characters. Long Bright River is an outstanding crime novel… I absolutely loved it."
—Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then one of them goes missing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.
Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit—and her sister—before it's too late.
Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.
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Excerpts-
  • From the book There's a body on the Gurney Street tracks. Female, age unclear, probable overdose, says the dispatcher.

    Kacey, I think. This is a twitch, a reflex, something sharp and subconscious that lives inside me and sends the same message racing to the same base part of my brain every time a female is reported. Then the more rational part of me comes plodding along, lethargic, uninspired, a dutiful dull soldier here to remind me about odds and statistics: nine hundred overdose victims in Kensington last year. Not one of them Kacey. Furthermore, this sentry reproves me, you seem to have forgotten the importance of being a professional. Straighten your shoulders. Smile a little. Keep your face relaxed, your eyebrows unfurrowed, your chin untucked. Do your job.

    All day, I've been having Lafferty respond to calls for us for further practice. Now, I nod to him, and he clears his throat and wipes his mouth. Nervous.

    -2613, he says.

    Our vehicle number. Correct.

    Dispatch continues. The RP is anonymous. The call came in from a payphone, one of several that still line Kensington Avenue and, as far as I know, the only one of those that still works.

    Lafferty looks at me. I look at him. I gesture to him. More. Ask for more.

    -Got it, says Lafferty into his radio. Over.

    Incorrect. I raise mine to my mouth. I speak clearly.

    -Any further information on location? I say.

    After I end the call, I give Lafferty a few pointers, reminding him not to be afraid to speak plainly to Dispatch-many rookie officers have the habit of speaking in a kind of stilted, masculine manner they have most likely picked up from films or television-and reminding him, too, to extract from Dispatch as many details as he can.

    But before I've finished speaking, Lafferty says, again, Got it.

    I look at him. Excellent, I say. I'm glad.

    I've only known him an hour, but I'm getting a sense for him. He likes to talk-already I know more about him than he'll ever know about me-and he's a pretender. An aspirant. In other words, a phony. Someone so terrified of being called poor, or weak, or stupid, that he won't even admit to what deficits he does have in those regards. I, on the other hand, am well aware that I'm poor. More so than ever now that Simon's checks have stopped coming. Am I weak? Probably in some ways: stubborn, maybe, obstinate, mulish, reluctant to accept help even when it would serve me to. Physically afraid, too: not the first officer to throw herself in front of a bullet for a friend, not the first officer to throw herself into traffic in the pursuit of some vanishing perpetrator. Poor: yes. Weak: yes. Stupid: no. I'm not stupid.

    I was late to roll call this morning. Again. I am ashamed to admit it was the third time in a month, and I despise being late. A good police officer is punctual if she is nothing else. When I walked into the common area-a drab, bright space, devoid of furniture, adorned only by peeling policy posters on the wall-Sergeant Ahearn was waiting for me, arms crossed.

    -Fitzpatrick, he said. Welcome to the party. You're with Lafferty today in 2613.

    -Who's Lafferty, I said, before I thought better of it. I really didn't intend to be funny. Szebowski, in the corner, laughed aloud once.

    Ahearn said, That's Lafferty. Pointing.

    There he was, Eddie Lafferty, second day in the district. He was busying himself across the room, looking at his blank activity log. He glanced at me quickly and apprehensively. Then he bent down, as if noticing something on his shoes, which were freshly polished, somehow glistening. He pursed his lips. Whistled lowly. At the time, I almost felt sorry for...
Reviews-
  • Kirkus

    September 15, 2019
    A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets. The title of Moore's (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to "a long bright river of departed souls," the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don't have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: "Our mother. Our father." As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick--a bright but emotionally damaged single mom--is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn't seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could "steal them and use them [her]self." She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action--the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don't have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do. With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it's almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.

    COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Publisher's Weekly

    October 14, 2019
    Moore (The Unseen World) weaves a police procedural and a family drama into a captivating novel. Mickey Fitzpatrick, a single mother, is an officer for the Philadelphia PD, tasked with patrolling Kensington, a neighborhood devastated by opioid addiction. Drugs have impacted Mickey’s life as well: her mother died of an overdose, her father, also an addict, is thought dead after disappearing, and her estranged younger sister, Kasey, is a known user and prostitute. While on her beat, Mickey tries to keep tabs on Kasey by speaking to locals and shop owners, but when Kasey vanishes amid a flurry of unsolved murders of women in the neighborhood, Mickey dedicates herself to finding Kasey and the killer, all the while praying her sister isn’t the next victim. Moore breaks her novel into sections labeled “Then” and “Now,” filling each with short, direct chapters that explore Mickey and Kasey’s history while also propelling the narrative’s murder mystery. The author presents several characters as the potential killer, and though seasoned readers may guess the culprit long before the reveal, Mickey’s personal journey that runs parallel to her pursuit is smartly crafted. Filled with strong characters and a layered plot, this will please fans of both genre and literary fiction.

  • Booklist

    Starred review from October 1, 2019
    Mickey Fitzpatrick is a beat cop in Philadelphia's rough Kensington neighborhood, not far from where she grew up in her grandmother's literally and figuratively cold house. In childhood, her saving grace was her younger sister, Kacey, who was friendly in contrast to Mickey's painful shyness and tough as opposed to Mickey's meek. But the distance that developed as they hit adolescence widened into a chasm as Kacey fell deeper into heroin addiction. Mickey is used to not seeing her sister, but as young women, all addicts and sex workers, start being found dead in Kensington, she realizes that her sister's absence may be something more sinister. One of the pleasures of this deeply moving, absolutely page-turning novel is the way Moore (The Unseen World, 2016), in both the present and in flashbacks to Mickey and Kacey's childhood and teen years, slowly peels back layer after layer, revealing the old-boy's network in the Philadelphia police force, the depths of Mickey's loneliness, and the way the city of Philadelphia, particularly Kensington, is woven into this story, for good or ill. Give this to readers who like character-driven crime novels with a strong sense of place.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

  • Library Journal

    Starred review from December 1, 2019

    Two sisters, thick as thieves when they were children being raised by a bitter grandmother, are now estranged as adults. Kacey is a prostitute, lost to the streets of Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood, and feeding the same need for opioids that killed the sisters' mother. Single parent Mickey, a police officer working that same neighborhood, is valiantly juggling the demands of adored four-year-old son Thomas and a job she loves. Mickey is drawn into a string of murders of prostitutes, terrified that her missing sister may be the next victim and alarmed that the Philadelphia Police Department does not seem to be following crucial leads. Mickey reaches out to an old partner for help, but ultimately she conducts a solo search for her sister that imperils all she holds dear and drags her back to a past riddled with unanswered questions. VERDICT In her fourth novel (following The Unseen World), Rome Prize-winning author Moore blends the reality of today's deadly opioid crisis with a complicated family dynamic to create an intense mystery with stunning twists and turns. Impossible to put down, impossible to forget. [See Prepub Alert, 7/1/19.]--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

    Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Library Journal

    August 1, 2019

    The Rome Prize winner of Heft and An Unseen World introduces us to two once-close sisters walking the same Philadelphia street. But Mickey is a beat cop, dedicated to her work and relentlessly worried about Kacey, a drug addict. Then Kacey disappears at a time when a series of murders erupt in the environs. Big in-house raves.

    Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Long Bright River
Long Bright River
A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)
Liz Moore
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