REVIEW: "Beneath Devil's Bridge" by Loreth Anne White
The summer before I was scheduled to enter high school, I started to worry that I was unprepared.
I wasn't concerned about my academic preparations, but instead that I wasn't ready to acclimate to the social structure of this newer, bigger school with intimidating, more experienced peers. Ever studious, I decided to watch teen comedies in an attempt to ascertain what, exactly, it would be like to be in high school.
Even now, I remember sitting there, slack jawed, completely unable to comprehend how, over the course of a short few months, my friends and I would transform from innocent adolescents who has just exited childhood to experienced mini-adults who drank and fornicated and, apparently, had no curfew.
Fortunately for me, upon entering high school I found that the change wasn’t quite as abrupt as the recent theatrical releases had led me to believe.
For me at least, a summer/fall band geek who transformed into a winter/spring theater nerd, innocence still reigned.
My friends and I didn’t drink.
We didn't have sex.
And the closest thing we came to a brush with the law was the time Tony Goh got a ticket for speeding in Polaris Parkway because he was in too big a hurry to get to Steak and Shake.
I do realize, though, that this prolonged innocence isn’t universal. The ridiculously risky behaviors we see in movies and TV depictions of high school are accurate for some teens. And it was these very same scary-to-13-year-old-me behaviors that triggered all of the conflict in this thriller.
It’s been 20 years since 15-year-old Leena Rai first disappeared. 20 years since they found her body, days after her parents reported her missing, bloody and battered, in the waters beneath Devil’s Bridge. And for these 20 years, the residents of Twin Falls have rested easy, confident that Leena’s killer is safely behind bars.
But now, someone’s back to reignite the fire that has smoldered under this community since that fateful day. Trinity Scott, a true crime podcaster, has decided to take a deep dive into this purportedly solved case.
Dogged in her endeavor, she is determined to interview everyone involved. This includes Clayton Jay Pelly, the former high school guidance counselor who ultimately admitted to murdering Leena, as well as Rachel Hart, the detective who was responsible for putting Pelly behind bars.
The residents of Twin Falls have long been reluctant to discuss the Rai murder, and as Trinity digs deeper it becomes clear why. What started out as a disappearance and morphed into the murder of an innocent left a gash in the community that has never quite healed. And the deeper Trinity digs the more apparent it becomes that it’s the lack of true answers that has kept this wound festering.
Gritty and dark and disturbing, this novel was absolutely unputdownable.
As so many thrillers truly are, this novel was less about the crime and more about the impact of the crime on the people within this community. And new-to-me author Loreth Anne White did an exceptional job amassing a cast of complexly flawed, yet ultimately likable characters. From driven-to-a-fault Rachel Hart to her damaged-in-more-ways-than one daughter Maddie, nearly every character within this novel had the type of compelling backstory necessary to feel real and authentic.
A discussion of this strengths of this novel would not be complete without mentioning White’s twists. Anticipating that this to be more a police procedural and less a psychological thriller, I wasn’t really expecting the types of twists and turns that so often appear in the latter. But, to my delight, really, my expectations were proven wrong when, multiple times within this novel, White surprised the hell out of me with unexpected, yet ultimately believable twists.
The only challenge I encountered when reading this book was keeping track of the narrator. The point of view shifted throughout this novel, with seemingly no pattern.
While treating readers to the perspectives of many different characters within the novel certainly had its benefits, it did prove difficult, at times, to keep track of which character’s eyes we were currently looking through.
Despite this admittedly incredibly minor issue, this novel resonated with me.
It was, at its core, a story about the way in which an unexpectedly horrible crime can entirely upset the foundation on which a dependably safe community rests. And it’s by viewing the events of this book through this broad lens — less as a story about what happened in this one community, and more as a cautionary tale of what could happen in any community — that it starts to feel universal.
It starts to feel horrifyingly possible.
It starts to feel, perhaps even, inevitable.
Thriller and mystery fans will not be disappointed by this surprisingly distinctive take on a tragically too common crime.
Beneath Devil’s Bridge earns an easy 5 out of 5 cocktails.
Reading this book made me even more grateful that I was a nerd who delighted in staying on the straight and narrow my entire high school career. What were you like in high school? If you had it to do over again, would you change anything? Tell me about it in the comments, below.
I’ve had some good luck with thrillers lately. Let’s pick up another one. Want to see which one I read next? Subscribe to updates in the sidebar and follow me on Goodreads.
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*I was provided a gifted copy of this title by the publisher*
