Sam McAlister, the 15-year-old narrator of Valerie Geary's debut novel, has her hands full. Her mother recently died of a heart attack and her 10-year-old sister, Ollie, obsessed with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and shadowed by the ghost of their mother, refuses to talk. After disappearing from their suburban family life for two years, their father, Bear, now lives in a teepee and keeps bees along the Crooked River outside rural Terrebonne, Ore. With few options, Sam and Ollie move in with Bear, and almost immediately discover a woman's brutally beaten corpse snagged in a tree branch hanging over a river eddy.
When the local deputy sheriff puts together enough evidence to lock up the odd and reclusive Bear for the murder, Sam's bad summer takes a turn for the terrible. It's hard enough being a teenager with a "regular" family, but now she has to take care of herself and Ollie and try to prove Bear's not a murderer. Crooked River is as much a coming-of-age novel as it is a well-paced mystery. Metaphorically punctuated with strategic quotations from Alice and nuggets of bee lore, it is also a story of family--in whatever shape it may come.
Despite the deputy's admonishment that she not be "a Nancy Drew," Sam uncovers clues suggesting her father's innocence, as well as secrets about Bear and the reason for his two-year disappearance from their lives. Geary takes teenage Sam through a looking-glass and then pulls her back with an adult's sense of loyalty and compassion--a journey equally worthwhile for all of us. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.