It’s a Mystery: “Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures”

Trace of Evil
By Alice Blanchard
Minotaur, 2019

Natalie Lockhart is a rookie detective in Burning Lake, New York, an isolated town known for its dark past:

Although Burning Lake was not as famous as Salem, Massachusetts, it occupied a unique place in history for a brief period of madness at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when three innocent women were executed for witchcraft there.

The book opens on the “deathiversary” of Natalie’s sister Willow, who was viciously murdered, apparently by a jealous boyfriend, twenty years earlier. Every year since, she and her sister Grace mark the day with a prayer over her grave. And although there is a man serving a life sentence for Willow’s murder, the trace evidence never added up and her death is part of a dark, unresolved past that is always with Natalie. Grief doesn’t come with instructions one of many lessons taught her by the tenacious, tough beat cop who was her dad:

Natalie’s father, Officer Joseph “Joey” Lockhart, had been blue through and through until the day he died, a proud member of the Burning Lake Police Department for thirty-five years…his favorite saying was, “Put a fork in us, we’re done.” …He taught Natalie his youngest daughter everything he knew about being a cop. Natalie was born with a knack for solving mysteries, Joey claimed. By the age of eight, she’d read all of Agatha Christie’s and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, and she beat everyone at Clue and Trivial Pursuit.

Now, as the newest member of the town’s police unit, her assigned task is reinvestigating “the Missing Nine.” In the past twenty-five years, nine transients disappeared – literally gone missing from Burning Lake – and it is Natalie’s turn to find out why. All the other detectives in the unit have delved into the case of how nine people had vanished off the face of the earth since the mid-1990’s. They all came up empty. It was tradition to pass the evidence—such as it was—along to the newbie. The misguided albeit shopworn assumption being that all that was needed was a fresh pair of eyes. There is also the strong element of hazing her. The Criminal Investigations Unit consisted of six male detectives, one male technical expert, and the BLPD’s first female detective—Natalie.

Then Daisy Bruckner is found dead on her kitchen floor with an ugly gash on the side of her head. She was a popular schoolteacher, wife to one of Natalie’s cop colleagues Brandon, newly pregnant and she and Natalie had grown up together. Everything points to Riley Skinner as prime suspect. He’s a sixteen-year-old troublemaker who, according to Brandon, was flunking out of Daisy’s class and threatened her in a rage a few weeks earlier. Natalie calls on Lieutenant Luke Pittman for help. He’s another childhood friend with whom she has a complicated relationship. They set out to find Riley. They find him in one of his haunts collapsed in a coma, which they discover he lapsed into not long after Daisy’s death.

As the investigation deepens, Natalie becomes enmeshed in highly personal emotional entanglements that have far reaching consequences. Every turn she takes is darker than the one before. No one escapes unscathed in this charged atmosphere.

Trace of Evil is a complicated novel rife with red herrings, Wiccan symbols and enough secrets to overload a broomstick. The showdown is a gut punch that you won’t see coming. That, of course, is what makes this a world class thriller.

—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.