During the World War II, Amie Stillwell lives in England and serves as a photo interpreter for the Allies. When the war ends, she works in Washington, DC, for several years but is eventually fired to make room for returning veterans. In a quandary, she returns to her home on coastal Maine, a fictitious village based on Kennebuckport.
Back home, odd incidents begin happening immediately as Amie, in an attempt to save someone’s life, crashes her Aston-Martin into a Bentley stopped on the tracks with a train barreling down. The driver takes off before Amie can determine who they are. Later, Amie connects with people she’s known all her life, most importantly Shibby Travis, a transplanted Texan, who served as Amie’s foster mother. Mysterious events happen such as a young boy being dropped off to be cared for by Shibby, the town’s de facto “foster home” for children and people being murdered by an unknown assailant. Amie uses the attention to detail she perfected in England, using a stereoscope to identify changes in the landscape that might signal changes indicating movements of the Nazi army, looking for what was there or wasn’t there before, to look for the killer. In the midst of these happenings, Amie also searches for a boy she once loved who ran away from Shibby’s home to serve in the war and who appears to have been killed in action. But his death remains unconfirmed, and Shibby believes he is still alive.
Joy Jordan-Lake does a great job capturing the essence of Maine and the 1950s. She also develops a strong female character not afraid to deal with misogynists. There is a hint of romance, but it’s not the basis of the book, and it’s refreshing to have a woman with better things to do (like get her life back together, open her own art gallery, and solve mysteries) than fall in love.
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A Bend of Light (Lake Union Publishing, September 6, 2022) is available through:
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