The Bottom Line: A pair of brilliant domestic thrillers that deftly explores the intersection of greed, grief and maternal instinct. Highly recommended.
My Sister’s Daughter begins as photographer and married mother of two Ashley Bowers arrives at her deceased sister’s home to do the unthinkable – adopt her thirteen year old niece, Serena. The sisters’ estranged relationship makes the tragic circumstances especially awkward, as this is the first time Ashley and Serena have met. Making matters worse, Serena is only allowed to take her clothes to her new home, as her biological parents’ house and its contents are subject to bank foreclosure.
The family is no stranger to tragedy. Ashley’s parents died in a helicopter accident, while Serena’s father died in a freak accident and her mother’s death may be alcohol-related drowning. If there’s any hope for a fresh start, it may be in the fact that Serena is so close in age to Ashley’s own daughter, Luna.
But as Serena gets settled in her new home, things spiral out of control quickly. A variety of items at the Bowers home are apparently sabotaged – clothing, jewelry and trampoline netting. The simplest explanation is that Serena is acting out. But upon closer examination, Ashley discovers far more sinister secrets and begins to ponder the possibility that her troubled niece isn’t to blame after all.
The book’s second novella, Silent Echo, is thematically consistent with the first. While author Liv Constantine explores how greed can drive a steely dagger through any family, she digs deepest into the psychological fallout of generational grief. In Silent Echo, Sisters Penelope and Nora’s parents died in a crash with their drunk father behind the wheel (with devastating downstream effects). Elsewhere, a mother, Charlotte, is haunted by the death of her young son, Sebastian, in an accident that sent his bus into the frigid Chesapeake Bay – or at least that’s what she believes for a time. Eventually, she sees him in a stranger’s social media post, igniting theories that he may have been kidnapped. The quest is met with incredulity by her husband, who took out a hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy on the boy.
Across both stories, the process by which Constantine’s heroines discover the truth is both psychologically heavy and entirely absorbing. Unlike formulaic amateur sleuths, Charlotte and Ashley have no hidden superpowers or long-hidden analytical prowess. Their investigations are instead driven by pain, and are intuitive, messy and emotional – which is precisely what makes them so compelling.
The two novellas are far from mirror images of each other, but the symmetry between them is strong enough to deliver a cohesive, singular experience.
