An involved tale with bullying very much to the fore. Not strictly a whodunit for we know that early on but it’s how he covers, hides and copes that we really follow with some nice side plots added in. Wyatt, 55, overweight and a loser gets hoodwinked by his mates, rescued by a ‘wild child’ and kills her. A couple of days later he has a heart attack and then a nurse befriends him. Meanwhile the body of the ‘wild child’ is found in the woods by a 13-year old and her story and fascination take us on a different route. Extraordinary story.
Thirteen-year-old Emily Houchens doesn't have many friends. She spends her time alone in the woods near her house - her safe place, until she finds the body of a young woman. Susanna Mitchell is searching for her sister, Ronnie, who vanished after leaving a late-night bar. The more she discovers about Ronnie's life, the more she realises that her sister began to disappear long before she went missing. THE NEXT TIME YOU SEE ME explores the fault-lines of a small community - their hidden desires and their other, secret selves.
Holly Goddard Jones is the author of Girl Trouble: Stories (Harper Perennial 2009). Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Epoch, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, and elsewhere, and she was a 2007 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She teaches in the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and lives in North Carolina with her husband, Brandon. The Next Time You See Me is her first novel.
