The town of BONEY CREEK is set in the middle of a long dry nowhere, off a relatively new highway. While the term stockman suggests Australia, this novel has minimal location context and could equally well have occurred off an American Southwest highway. The shrinking, stagnant town has one remaining shop and the fuel pumps outside it don’t work. Great idea to buy the store. A failed journalist, Addie Clarkson, agrees to her husband Toby making the purchase at immense speed. If this is their home now, you would think they would get a survey done of the structure and assess the store debts. Nope. The elderly shopkeeper and postmistress passed away and the post must continue. So they got a knockdown price for expedited sale. Only now do they start to understand that the death was the most recent in a spate of seemingly coincidental accidents. Leaving the city after a break-in is giving the couple in their thirties a new start. But this small town isn’t totally welcoming. There is only one young person left, Clancy, a teen girl still at school, who puts her adult neighbours to shame by welcoming and assisting the newcomers. Clancy happens to be obsessed with the seven deaths, which she calls murders. Her boyfriend was among them. Toby admits to being haunted by a series of deaths and disappearances off the highway decades ago. If there was a serial killer at work, have they started again? Someone in Boney Creek is covering up murders – past, present, or both. In what might not be her smartest move, Addie decides to start a blog about the accidents. She's not here a week. I chuckled at the way that Clancy and her late boyfriend Kip got into podcasting and vlogging so that even the blog idea seemed old-style to her. Addie clearly wasn’t a great journalist, which she blames on only being assigned light pieces, as she never includes photos of the vicinity in her blog or references documents like a cemetery list. Somehow everyone in town seems to read the blog within a day, which seems odd, like many of the other occurrences. One cranky neighbour started running into another as I read, most of them called by first name and all living some distance apart in the dry surroundings. Walter Brooks the parson is an exception, as he's happy to see new blood and potential funding. Paula Gleeson shows us the effect of isolation and reduced income once the bypassing highway was built. BONEY CREEK is a tangled, atmospheric tale, chilling at times, and full of sadness, with the prospect of improvement due to the newcomers.
When several small-town locals die under mysterious circumstances, an aspiring journalist is determined to prove the connection between them, only to discover the dangerous secrets they left behind.
Boney Creek is a dying town where not a lot happens. The perfect solution for married couple Addie and Toby who are escaping their own personal tragedy. But a quiet and simple life is not exactly possible with so many recent, strange deaths.
Seven locals, all gone too soon. That’s the nature of tragic accidents. And in a town this small, there’s no room for too many questions.
But Addie isn’t so sure. Although she never followed through on her dreams of becoming a journalist, she still has a reporter’s instincts. And her gut—not to mention all the small-town gossip—is telling her that whatever’s happening in Boney Creek is not as random as it seems.
There’s no such thing as coincidence, especially when it comes to seven bodies. And while burying her own secrets, Addie digs up far greater ones that will have her asking if she will be the town’s next so-called accident.
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