Thank you to critic Oline Cogdill for sharing her review of The Reckoning by Kelli Stanley. You can order a copy of the Renata Drake thriller through The Poisoned Pen’s Webstore. https://tinyurl.com/k3f65j8c
Cogdill’s review was originally published in the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
A secret identity and an open secret drive Kelli Stanley’s ‘The Reckoning’
The harvest’ is an open secret
‘The Reckoning’ by Kelli Stanley; Severn House; 336 pages; $29.99
A young woman trying to escape her past settles in an isolated, unfamiliar town that has its own shady underpinnings in “The Reckoning,” Kelli Stanley’s new series launch.
“The Reckoning” works well as a story about self-reinvention, debilitating grief and ennui in a small town that relies on an illegal business to survive. Stanley also weaves in a look at the 1980s — a time that seems so long ago and yet also, for some, like yesterday.
Renata Drake wants to disappear from everything and everyone she knows, so she leaves Washington, D.C., for Garberville, California, an area she knows nothing about (except she once saw its Humboldt County featured in a flyer). Renata grieves for her deceased sister, Josie, and fears being arrested for meting out her own form of justice for the death.
The several days’ journey to Humboldt reminds Renata of a View-Master reel she received one Christmas, and the California countryside is “a lost world of massive redwood trees.” Economically depressed, Garberville depends on an illicit economy — cannabis production — that is the town’s most open secret.
“The harvest” of marijuana is Garberville’s “curse and blessing,” paying for most everything including the hospital and infrastructure. It also has brought the FBI, who want to shut it down. This is the 1980s, during which legal marijuana was unthinkable.
Renata, now calling herself Nattie, tries to stay below the FBI’s radar and avoid any attention from the town residents. But a new person, especially a young attractive woman, naturally draws curiosity. Nattie takes a job as a janitor at the hospital and finds a refuge in the library, striking up a friendship with the lonely librarian.
Nattie tries to be invisible but is drawn into the investigation of a missing 16-year-old, the third teenage girl to disappear in three years. She constantly checks the Washington, D.C., newspapers that often arrive a week late to see if her actions have been reported.
Stanley melds the setting with character, making each an important part of the other. Nattie wants freedom, which Garberville seems to offer with its rural, open spaces. Yet Nattie — like many of the town’s teenagers — feels confined, because Garberville also feels claustrophobic.
Stanley also has a series on private detective Miranda Corbie set in pre-World War II San Francisco. Her affinity for historical fiction continues with “The Reckoning.”