Sundial

When Rob finds animal parts hidden in her daughter Callie’s room, she packs the girl up and takes her to Sundial, her family’s remote, now uninhabited outpost in the Mojave Desert. Her father had kept Rob and her sister, Jack, sequestered at Sundial with no access to the outside world or people outside the family, other than the graduate students who came to aid him and his assistant/partner Mia with their experiments. The book shifts between the past, as Rob and Jack learn more about the work their father and Mia are doing, and the present day, as Rob tries to use her time alone with Callie to teach her about the darkness in their family’s past. But the longer they stay in the desert, the more Rob comes to realize how unreliable her own version of her family history may be. Ward’s (The Last House on Needless Street) latest gets off to a brisk start, slows down in the middle, and then races to the finish at such a breakneck speed that readers may struggle to absorb the full range of horrors Rob is recollecting. Note that many readers will be disturbed by scenes of experiments on animals.