“One night in a small Michigan town in the late 1970s, a young woman named Beth leaves her job as a hotel receptionist and disappears into the snow. When the ice thaws, her remains surface by the side of the road; her unsolved murder becomes another dark moment in the town’s history. Twenty-five years later, a group of college students decide to reopen the case for a class project.
The writing in Andrea Portes’s Bury This is appealingly lush and well-crafted, flashing between past and present as the students conduct interview after interview in the hopes of unearthing a juicy story for their documentary film class. In the 1970s, we follow Beth and her best friend Shauna from their early teens until the fateful day of the murder, and we begin to see how one girl ended up dead and the other ended up depressed and alone, waiting for her turn to be released from a purgatory-like life. No one is innocent; behind every door there’s a sordid secret.
Portes’s story is heavy on depraved, abusive men and desperate women with no way out, a murder mystery with many victims and no heroes. Even the college students trying to solve Beth’s death are upsettingly eager for scandal, until they realize too late the horror they have uncovered.”
—Emma Page, Island Books, for Shelf Awareness
This does not sound like a book that will get buried in you stack! Buy it now, from Island Books, on Mercer Island.