ARC Review: Little Falls by Elizabeth Lewes

Little Falls
Author: Elizabeth Lewes
Publication: Crooked Lane Books (August 11, 2020)

Description: She tried to forget the horrors of war--but her quiet hometown conceals a litany of new evils.

Sergeant Camille Waresch did everything she could to forget Iraq. She went home to Eastern Washington and got a quiet job. She connected with her daughter, Sophie, whom she had left as a baby. She got sober. But the ghosts of her past were never far behind.

While conducting a routine property tax inspection on an isolated ranch, Camille discovers a teenager's tortured corpse hanging in a dilapidated outbuilding. In a flash, her combat-related PTSD resurges--and in her dreams, the hanging boy merges with a young soldier whose eerily similar death still haunts her. The case hits home when Sophie reveals that the victim was her ex-boyfriend--and as Camille investigates, she uncovers a tangled trail that leads to his jealous younger brother and her own daughter, wild, defiant, and ensnared.

The closer Camille gets to the truth, the closer she is driven to the edge. Her home is broken into. Her truck is blown up. Evidence and witnesses she remembers clearly are erased. And when Sophie disappears, Camille's hunt for justice becomes a hunt for her child. At a remote compound where the terrifying truth is finally revealed, Camille has one last chance to save her daughter--and redeem her own shattered soul.

My Thoughts: This was a tense but somewhat odd mystery. I was drawn in to the world where Camille Waresh lives. She is a Vet who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and came home with PTSD. She had left her infant daughter with her parents when she joined the service. But now with both of her parents gone, she is struggling with connecting with her now 15-year-old daughter. 

Camille works as an assessor for her county. One day she discovers the hanging body of a young man when she goes to look at a property. The death brings back memories from her time in the service. One of her soldiers was also found hanging in a derelict building. The current investigation has some eerie similarities with the other one. Camille becomes sure that the two events are connected.

Camille begins her own investigation into the death of the young man who was a former boyfriend of her daughter. But she faces all sorts of problems not the least of which is that she is swept up by flashbacks to her time in Iraq and suffers memory losses. Also causing problems is that her daughter seems to be involved in the conspiracy Camille discovers. She also faces attacks on her property as she investigates. And evidence and documents disappear which could be a function of someone cleaning up the evidence or could be that she just imagined this evidence in the first place. 

Many things indicate that Camille is looking back at the events of her investigation but the story doesn't indicate how she got from the time of the investigation to the time when she is looking back at it. The ending came as a complete surprise to me. In fact, I turned the page thinking that there had to be more to the story - that it couldn't end like that. 

There were many things I enjoyed about the story. There was certainly a lot of tension that built and built. I thought Camille was an interesting character. I just wasn't sure I could trust what she saw or did.

Favorite Quote:

Anger fueled. But rage...rage destroyed. Rage was -- it's like staring into the sun, standing so close my skin smokes, my eyes melt. It's like a geyser in my chest, the pressure building and building until it's all let loose through my fists. When my vision cleared, I was panting, hunched over the steering column, knuckles scraped raw.

I received this one in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley. You can buy your copy here.