The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon

DEBUT Detective Susan Ford is on modified duty while Internal Affairs reviews her actions in a recent case, in which she shot and killed Calvin Barnes, a young Black man. The fallout reverberates: Calvin’s family wants answers about his death, and his father confronts Susan late in the book; she second-guesses herself: did she see what she thought she saw? McCreary’s mystery debut deals with one of the biggest questions in genre: how to handle a police procedural in the era of Black Lives Matter. (Susan is herself a supporter of the town’s BLM movement.) At the same time, Susan works with her retired father on a cold case. Forty years earlier, waitress Trudy Solomon went missing; Susan’s father had been the lead detective on the case. He always thought that a powerful local family, the owners of a Catskills resort, knew more than they revealed. When skeletal remains are discovered in New York, and Trudy is found alive, with Alzheimer’s, in a retirement home, new questions arise.