Thank you NetGalley and Post Hill Press for the ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

I have just finished this book and my thoughts are still swirling...which is always the sign of a great read! This is a great story based upon true crime and an intriguing mystery / thriller that I could not put down.

There are 2 main characters that also are our narrators: the Wife and the Writer. Both narrators are telling 2 seemingly different stories until they intersect with a clash in such a clever and masterful way. Honestly, I spent the first half of the book trying to figure out how, when and where the 2 narrator stories would intersect. Once the stories combined into one, I could barely keep up!

The Wife is dealing with a missing husband and her 2 children. The writer is living a dysfunctional life filled with bulimia, loneliness and growing up in the persistent shadow of a real life 1948 murder. The book explores eating disorders, Covid, the effect trauma can have on its victims, adultery, domestic abuse, familial secrecy, Argentina's historical unrest, and motherhood. How the author combines and weaves the two stories together is masterful.

Loved this! Looking forward to publication day!!!

This was a fun read, it took a while for the narrative threads to come together from the key protagonists - and to be honest I had far more for the characters when they weren't so enmeshed -unfortunately once they did the book lost some of its appeal as a reader. The mix of lies vs truth between the lonely writer and the lonely wife is compelling. but the end left me far from sated.

Deborah Goodrich Royce’s “Reef Road,” which reads a bit like a cross between Truman Capote and Joan Didion, concerns a young girl’s unsolved stabbing death and its connection to the narrator/writer, whose mother was a close friend of the victim. Intersecting with that story line is an account of another young mother’s bizarre story of how her husband and two young children have gone missing, and the puzzle for the reader for roughly half the novel is to try to figure out how the two narrative lines are connected. Eventually the link is spelled out, though, as the novel starts taking on the aspects of an increasingly over-the-top thriller. Distinguishing Royce’s novel, though, is an arresting narrative voice with occasional asides to the reader – think John Fowles’ “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” which is in fact cited – as well as a compelling look at Argentina’s “Dirty War.” There are also some nicely turned sentences along the way, for instance when a character notices another character’s head snapping to the left, “looking for her car or her bicycle or her fucking broomstick, whatever the hell mode of transportation she’d used to get here tonight.”

Deberah Goodrich Royce has done a brilliant job of bringing to life a past true crime with this exceptional novel. An elderly writer is coming to terms with and seeking atonement for the murder of young girl who was a girlfriend. of her mother's. Her mother's life was forever changed which in turn changed the raising of her own child. There are many twists and turns in the story that involve the daughter of the man responsible for the murder some seventy years ago. The story is divided by the lives of The Writer and The Wife and capture moments of grief, obsession, intimacy, truth, lies and trauma. A five (5) star read.

Palm Beach, Florida is a place in the sun for the uber wealthy, but it harbors a dark side. When a severed hand washes up in the beach, two women, one obsessed with finding out who killed her mother’s best friend, the other, frantic with worry after her husband absconds with their children, are forced together by the first Covid shutdown. Determined to uncover their truths, they both risk everything for the answers. Royce captures all the heat, humidity, natural beauty and relentless violence that make up South Florida