Part mystery and part ghost story, See How Small builds slowly into a complex narrative about a brutal crime and its impact on the Austin, Tex., neighborhood of its victims. During a robbery of an ice-cream store, three teenage girl employees are stripped, gagged with their underwear and killed in the fire the robbers leave in their wake. The crime goes unsolved for years and gradually takes its toll on the witnesses, store customers, first responders, the girls' families and the criminals themselves.
In short chapters, the narrative moves among characters--the owner of the store and mother of two of the victims, the fireman who found the girls too late to save them, the getaway car driver, a local news reporter and others--exposing their personal struggles independent of the tragedy and at the same time revealing clues to the events that led to the crime. In a kind of Greek chorus, even the dead girls provide commentary on their pasts and imagined futures.
Blackwood's language rarely misses--whether describing Hollis (an unstable war vet who "can't find the mental thread on which to string the everyday beads of life") or the fireman's teen daughter's boyfriend (who "smells pungently like bong smoke and carries around a little tackle box of harmonicas in different keys and can't play a lick"). Scott Blackwood (We Agreed to Meet Just Here) so successfully weaves together disparate strands that See How Small turns into a rich tapestry of human failing and hopeful striving. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.