Sacrificed Lives

The last thing Harriet Ross wants to do is return to the small South Carolina town she used to visit as a child. This is because when she was a teen, on a hot summer day when she wasn't feeling well, her cousins, twins Yvette and Yvonne bugged her to go to the store with them. She gives them some money and asks them to bring her a grape soda...its 1966, a small town, no one thinks twice about sending a pair of six year olds to the store. Sadly though, the unthinkable happens...one the twins disappears, the other is eventually found hiding in a barn, her mind gone from the terror that she witnessed and never recovered from.

Thirty years later, Harriet is back, to probate her Aunt Missella Mayhews estate, and to set up some sort of trust fund for Yvette, who now lives in a home. As she realizes that her Aunt couldnt possibly have afforded such an expensive care home for Yvette, and as guilt leads her to question what more could have been done to find the kidnapper, she asks her lawyer Balt Monroe to help her investigate. He knows he cant help...but his old friend, Doc Halliday, a private investigator, can. The case will take them through strange twists and turns, through the evils of racism to the ultimate and most sorrowful of crimes.

At the heart of Sacrificed Lives is the topic of racism. Brackett studies it unflinchingly, as she introduces us to the harsh, vile world of the Klu Klux Clan. She also balances things out, trying not to overwhelm the reader with one viewpoint. For example, she has one white protagonist, Balt, who is a good and generous man, and a Black protagonist, named Punch, whose hatred of white people makes a basically good...if hard...man loose control. Doc, our main character, understands both these worlds as he tracks down clues. Its also a novel with many surprises...from the sorrow of the twins cloth doppelgangers that serve as mute testimony to the fact that Missella never recovered from the loss of her children, to the fact that from the beginning we know that Yvette is not quite as incapacitated mentally as everyone thinks. The idea of being stuck prisoner in ones own mind is almost as frightening as the truth of what she witnessed that night 30 years ago.

This book is extremely well paced, thoughtful and exciting, filled with a true flavor of the south and unforgettable characters.

4 out of 5 trench coats
-- Cindy Lynn Speer, GWN Book Reviewer
May 5, 2003