Hello readers! I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and are looking forward to the new year just as much as me. I just finished reading Wake by Shelley Burr and I’m excited to share my thoughts with you.
If you are new here, you should probably know that I don’t typically write book reviews to suggest books that I think you should read. I tend to write them so that if you’ve just finished flipping through the pages of the novel and you are hoping to find someone to gossip about the book with, you can come here and read my thoughts on it. Add your thoughts in the comments. That said, there are going to be many spoilers in this review. If you want a spoiler-free review, I suggest checking out this review from Alice and the Giant Bookshelf on Youtube (which I watched seconds after finishing the book as I tried to digest the ending.)
Wake is a mystery/crime thriller and is the debut novel of Shelley Burr. Considering it is a debut novel, I did feel like it was very well written and it held my interest well. For example, one of the things that really bothers me about reading some crime fiction is when the graphic/violent aspect of the crime is the center of the book. I don’t like reading anything that is so gnarly that it turns my stomach or stays with me for weeks on end, making me feel ill about it. This book does a great job of skirting around sensitive topics and dealing with traumatic events, without needing to plaster trigger warnings all over it. Specifically, a character is found with highly disturbing images on his computer and the author does a good job of describing that they exist without having to paint the images for me – I appreciated that.
The narrative swaps back and forth between two main characters, Mina and Lane. Mina is the sister of a little girl who went missing nineteen years ago and has never been found. Lane is a private investigator who has turned up in the tiny town where it happened to try to solve it, with a one-million-dollar reward on the line. Both of these characters felt complex and were not trying to be likable, but I liked them. They had flaws and both had rude moments. Evie (Evelyn) McCreery is the sister who was taken.
Did Wednesday Adams Kill Evie?
The story itself is well done. I was fully invested in the characters and wanted them to succeed. The narrative goes back in time and gives us multiple perspectives, as well as often giving us a look at what is going on with the online forums. Internet sleuths are still obsessed with the disappearance and often post on there and it gives a really interesting third-party look at the story. Early on in the book, we find out that these internet sleuths have coined a few acronyms and shorthand phrases to discuss the McCreery murder. The title of the book is WAKE – which on the forum stands for “Wednesday Adams Killed Evie.” Wednesday Adams is a reference to Mina’s nickname “Wednesday” as a child. Throughout the entire book, we are left wondering if the internet sleuths are right about Mina. She does have some odd compulsions, she has anxious habits and was clearly traumatized by the experience she had as a child.
There is also some odd evidence that comes to light about the moments after Mina finds out that her sister is missing. The girls are nine, which is clearly old enough to understand the gravity of the situation, but Mina’s first response is to wonder whether she still gets to go to her pageant (that both girls were supposed to star in.) Five years later, when cadaver dogs look for her sister’s body on the property, she intervenes when she can tell the dog is going to signal. Later, she adopts a cadaver dog and walks the property as part of a daily ritual.
Speaking of the property, the McCreery property is a massive thousand-acre farm in rural Australia. This makes the search for the body difficult because much of the land is left in its natural state. Snakes, brush, excessive heat, and so much land to cover make it nearly impossible. It seems (from the acknowledgments at the back of the book) that the author did her research for the novel. She’s a native Australian who grew up on a sheep farm and moreover, she did get bit by a brown snake and had to be helicopter-lifted to a hospital (something that happens to one of the characters in the book.)
Mina seems to want the whole “affair to be over” – a feeling that rivals her desire for her sister’s body to be found. She was sleeping in the same room as Evie on the night of the disappearance. At first, she claims that she had been completely asleep and never heard a thing. Near the end of the book, Lane questions how she wouldn’t have heard the squeaky window and notices that they would have to have used a ladder to get up to the sill (which seems challenging to do with a NINE-year-old child in tow!) Mina eventually admits that she had woken up, in the middle of the night, to Evie saying she was going to go outside for a walk. Mina said she refused to go.
Finally, the final scene of the book is that of a new search party looking for the body on the property and finding it – in the exact same spot that Mina had prevented them from searching before. Had she always known that her sister was buried under the log? Did she kill her? If so, how and why? These are all left open to consideration. This is my main issue with the book because it isn’t clear if “WAKE” is a red herring, something to throw us for a loop and distract from the actual murderer, or if she wanted to slide those little details in as a juicy twist at the end.
Personally, I don’t believe that she did commit this murder, I think that this is an unfortunate coincidence. Mina does kill someone in this book, but I don’t believe she killed her sister.
Lane Holland, Private Investigator (With Issues)
The other main character is Lane Holland, a private investigator who dives headfirst into trying to solve the McCreery case. In part, because of the reward money and in part because of his own bias in the situation. We know early on that his motivations are multifaceted, but the details of his motives are slowly revealed throughout the book.
Lane grew up in a terrible situation, living in a tiny mobile home with his mother and father, seemingly traveling from Carnival to Carnival and working a booth (Guess Your Weight) with his father. His mother is mixed up in an MLM selling candles and his father is horribly abusive. For years, Lane tries and fails to convince his mother to leave him and once his father is sent to prison for the crime of possessing photographs on his computer of his toddler sister, Lynnie, and their mother dies in a car accident, Lane takes over as her main caregiver.
Lane is kind of unusual because he seems to have always believed that his father was responsible for multiple kidnapping/murders of young girls in Australia. He has been traveling the country, case-to-case, trying to prove that his father is responsible. He believes that their transient lifestyle and his father’s habit of going off on his own for hours without explanation are suspicion enough that he was doing something. Lane’s search becomes an obsession as he wants to pin one of the murders on his father as a way to keep him imprisoned (and keep Lynnie safe.) I have a little bit of a problem with this because he doesn’t have much reason to believe that his father was kidnapping girls. In fact, the two crimes that we know his father was committing was possession of child pornography and car theft. The jump to murder is a bit of a stretch, but all of the characters in the book also think he’s a little unhinged when he reveals his theory.
In the end, Lane’s father is released from prison and Lane is there to pick him up. He drugs him and brings him to the McCreery property at gunpoint and demands that he reveals the location of the body. And… he does. Mina ends up in the car with them, an accomplice who takes the official stance as a victim when it’s all said and done, and she is very confident that Lane’s father is lying. That he doesn’t know where the body is. How is she so sure? I can’t help but wonder.
Lane’s father leads them to the location of a body, but not before trying to escape by beating them with a shovel and getting shot in the chest by Mina. Lane decides to take the fall for her, saying that he kidnapped both of them and murdered his dad. The body turns out not to be Evie McCreery, but a different little girl.
This is where things are murky. As Lane’s father lays dying, the following scene plays out:
“If he was innocent, he wouldn’t have moved, she told herself. She was going to get the police. THe only reason he would move was if he needed to prevent that.
That meant he was dangerous, right?
‘Please,’ she said. ‘If you killed her, please tell me.’
Lane Sr. smiled and the gurgling sound fell silent. ”
Wake by Shelley Burr, page 340
Later, the author has a short section where the narrative shifts.
“Here’s a story. A little girl slips out of her house at night. The door locks behind her, but the lock is fifty years old and she knows it will open again if she jiggles the loose brass handle just the right way. She walks along the path, sweeping the light of her torch in front other, looking for snakes attracted to the warm bricks. When the path ends she avoids the sticky mud, stepping on tussocks of grass and flat patches of bark instead.
Does she reach the windmill? Does she find out that, no, she can’t see the lights from the top? Where is she when she hears the hum of a familiar engine returning home unexpectedly and turns in excitement?”
Wake by Shelley Burr, page 351
So, this little section leans into the theory that Lane’s father (Lane Sr.) steals the car of one of the farm hands, drives to the house in the middle of the night, and discovers this little girl outside alone. Then he kidnaps her and shortly after disposes of her body on the property, not far from the house, behind a tree where the girl’s sister is going to sit for years to come.
This is what I think happened and that the author just leaves those other details to keep you thinking about the story. (Somewhat frustrating because I love a clear-cut ending.)
The other thing that I found interesting is that on Goodreads, this book is listed as part of a series, PI Lane HollandΒ #1. At the end of Wake, we know that Lane Holland is sent to prison for at least six years, so I had to wonder how he will continue on solving crimes from instead of the jail cell.
There is another book in the series, published in 2023, called Ripper where Lane apparently does try to solve crimes while imprisoned and it has some mixed reviews.
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