Favorite Quotes:

 

She leaned toward Liddie. She smelled like her father used to, a mix of coffee and marijuana. “Waking and baking these days?”

 

“Have you ever thought about what they must’ve been like before all of us? … I think about it. They met. They fell in love. They were regular people once.” “And what? We made them into irregular people?”

 

They always got the leftovers. The things left in the lost and found. If Liddie wrote a biography of her childhood, it would be called Nothing Was Ever Mine.

 

That was the bargain of being a twin. You didn’t need to talk about it; you simply knew that sometime in the not too distant future, you’d be living together in some old-age home, dressed alike the way you’d been as children.

 

He always smelled the same— slightly refrigerated. It was a smell Mary liked because it meant coolness to her. Not in a fashion sense but in the temperature way. He was calm, steady.

 

Of everyone in their family, the person she’d understood the least had been her mother. When Kate thought of her, she always seemed diaphanous. Like one of those Instagram filters had been applied to her, washing her out, smoothing away the lines. Nothing ever seemed to stick to her, not criticism or her children, not even her husband. She simply floated around, photographing it all, removed.

 

My Review:

 

Quite a clever gal, that Catherine McKenzie! This well-crafted mystery was full of simply explained yet brilliantly placed twists and turns that kept me on edge and off-center.   The storylines were highly eventful and ingeniously paced with tension and intrigue steadily ratcheting up the scale, and I was sucking it all in like the latest and greatest vacuum on the market.   I enjoyed the shrewdly discerning tale as much as the skill and cunning in the telling of it.

 

This family was well beyond quirky, they were each oddly peculiar and self-absorbed. I didn’t care for any of them by the time I finished the book, yet I was driven to know all about them. I had great empathy for the stalwart employee and held my breath for him and cringed each time evidence pointed his direction. Each character was fascinatingly flawed and I enjoyed unearthing their many secrets. This was only my second time reading her work but I am eager to see what Ms. McKenzie comes up with next, she now has a rather rabid fangirl on her hands.