The Scent of Rain and Lightning By Nancy Pickard

The Scent of Rain and Lightning

By Nancy Pickard

 

A decades-old mystery is solved and a woman’s haunting questions put to rest in Pickard’s latest thriller. When she was just three years old, Jody Linder lost both parents in one night, when her father, Hugh Jay—eldest son of the wealthiest rancher in the small town of Rose, Kansas—was killed and her mother, Laurie, vanished. Raised by grandparents, Hugh Senior and Annabelle Linder, and with loving support from three uncles, Jody spends years collecting human detritus around the area’s towering Testament Rocks, where authorities once searched for clues to Laurie’s disappearance. Jody’s world is rocked 23 years later when Billy Crosby, the vicious drunk convicted of her father’s murder on circumstantial evidence, is released for a new trial; his return to town brings events to a head.--Booklist

This book has an unexpected twist that I never saw coming. I like reads like this that keeps you on your toes and is not so predictable. Every now and then it got a little slow, but you barely noticed it from all the build-up of what you knew (or thought you knew) was coming.  In the midst of all of the sadness, there is a happy ending , Yay!