August 1, 2023
When Theodora "Teddy" Angstrom's father dies by suicide, unreconciled to the long-ago disappearance of Teddy's older sister Angie, Teddy learns that he's been involved with a Reddit group obsessing over Angie and slides down the same rabbit hole herself. Soon, she's losing all perspective, fixating on an amateur sleuth who wants to help her solve the case and determined to find Angie no matter what the cost. From debuter Brody. Prepub Alert.
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October 15, 2023
A woman reinvestigates her sister's disappearance after her father's death in this debut. Teddy Angstrom was 16 when her older sister, Angie, disappeared after sneaking out to a party. Afterward, everything seemed to fall apart. Now, 10 years later, her father has driven his car off a bridge, and Teddy and her mother are left to pick up the pieces. Cleaning her father's things, Teddy discovers that he was deeply invested in the online community built up around Angie's disappearance. What began as a daughter trying to close up loose ends in the wake of her father's death slowly devolves into Teddy finding herself more and more immersed in the true-crime community around what happened to Angie in ways that affect her love life, her job as a high school English teacher, and her relationship with her family. Through it all she's joined by Mickey, a local college student who was working with her father and is maybe too eager to help. As her life spirals around her, Teddy has to determine what is real and what is in her head. The novel can be stressful to read at times; the first-person narration gives an almost suffocating air to Teddy's increasing paranoia. Escalating series of bad decisions seem almost inevitable, but there's a clear logic to how Teddy reaches them, even if, by light of day, it seems fuzzy. Despite a few ham-fisted metaphors and egregiously unbelievable moments, the dizzying pace mixed with introspective passages (not to mention very short chapters) keep readers turning pages so the book flies by. A timely rumination on true crime, internet obsession, and paranoia.
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November 6, 2023
Brody’s sure-footed debut paints a harrowing portrait of a life derailed by internet conspiracy theories. Teddy Angstrom is a 26-year-old English teacher at a prestigious prep school in coastal Maine. When Teddy was 16, her 18-year-old sister, Angie, disappeared. Now, on the 10th anniversary of that event, Teddy’s father, Mark, has driven off a bridge to his death. Sifting through her father’s belongings, Teddy discovers he’d grown obsessed with Reddit true crime communities dedicated to Angie’s unsolved disappearance, many of which have developed far-flung conspiracy theories (including one that Mark killed Angie) to explain it. Equal parts horrified and fascinated by the discovery, Teddy starts to poke around the communities herself, quickly becoming addicted to the puzzles they present and neglecting her personal and professional responsibilities in the process. As she burrows ever deeper, her grasp on reality slips, and she begins confusing actual memories of her sister with some of the conspiracy theories. Did she really know Angie? Or her father? Narrating from Teddy’s point of view, Brody explores in elegant prose potent themes both contemporary (internet addiction) and evergreen (grief), though she winds up delivering more of a twisted character study than a bona fide mystery. For genre fans who don’t mind loose ends, this is worth the plunge.
November 1, 2023
Teddy Angstrom, 26, has made a life for herself in the small Maine town where she grew up, despite being haunted by the disappearance of her older sister, Angie, a decade ago. And then Teddy's father, Mark, commits suicide by driving his car off a bridge, leading Teddy to discover that Mark had been desperately searching for clues about Angie's fate on a true-crime Subreddit. Teddy is soon subsumed, reconnecting with Bill, the handsome landscaper Angie had a crush on, and meeting up with a 19-year-old named Mickey who is active on the Subreddit and more than eager to jump into Teddy's investigation. But the more wild theories Teddy starts chasing down, the more she starts to spiral: acting erratically at work, becoming increasingly interested in firearms, and even suspecting her estranged half-brother might have something to do with Angie's disappearance. Brody's debut is visceral and at times gut-wrenching, exploring the ways grief and a need for answers can be exacerbated and exploited by a culture obsessed with true-crime stories. Powerful and unforgettable.
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