Amazon.com Review

Devastated by her lover's death in a slaying that was her fault, Aud Torvingen has sequestered herself in an isolated Appalachian cabin she's painstakingly rebuilding. Grief is Aud's only companion--a grief so acutely and powerfully evoked that it's almost another character in this brilliant and multifaceted novel. Reluctantly drawn back to the world by her oldest friend, whose fiancée has gone missing, Aud agrees to investigate, and quickly tracks the missing Tammy Foster to a Soho loft. She also finds Geordie Karp, the psychopath who turned Tammy into a sexual and psychological slave and has already chosen his next victim, a 12-year-old girl who's been smuggled into the country and sold to Karp.

Stopping Karp, a task for which Aud is uniquely suited, tests her strength and her sanity; by transforming her grief into vengeance, she's forced to come to terms with the violence and brutality that are as central to her character as tenderness, sensuality, and vulnerability. Tautly plotted and pulsating with energy, this is a novel that won't let go, alternately searing and shocking as well as soaring with lyrical prose that's close to poetry in places. Aud, Nicola Griffith's complex protagonist who made her first appearance in The Blue Place, is never less than compelling in this stunning sequel. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

Griffith (The Blue Room; Slow River) opens her latest on the roof of a cabin in a North Carolina mountaintop forest, moving from a wide focus on a primordial wilderness to acute closeups of particular delicious sights and smells. Even before we learn the barest details about tall, blonde, singular Aud ("rhymes with shroud") Torvingen, we are seduced by her awareness, competence and her relish for the physical details of life. We learn that she has slipped off to this forest to rebuild an old cabin because she is grieving profoundly for her lover, Julia, who died in a hail of bullets. An old friend unexpectedly shows up asking for help tracking down his fiancee, who has gone missing in Manhattan, and the deft way Aud secures the cabin and travels (stopping outside of town to stow her pick-up truck and slip into an elegant Eileen Fisher outfit) reveals that this is a woman with a very sharp edge. Once Aud, a former Atlanta police officer, finds her friend's lover in a loft downtown, the action kicks into high gear and we are taken inside a character who is as brutal as she is sensitive, as wildly and exuberantly violent as she is bereaved. Yet as Griffith is enthralling us with each utterly convincing yet surprising turn, she also allows Aud to move forward emotionally. What makes Griffith's work especially satisfying and exciting is the way her extraordinary protagonist demolishes false human boundaries just as surely as she demolishes bad people. Aud is hugely complex and unique, and Griffith deserves a huge following.
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