Lisa Unger on BAD MOON

Authors — especially successful ones — are a generous lot. They want to see others succeed, too. So they’ll offer blurbs to new writers or talk up emerging ones whose work they enjoy. I can’t think of anyone more generous than Lisa Unger, bestselling author of FRAGILE and DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND. She wrote a blurb for my first book, DEATH NOTICE. For BAD MOON, she took it a step further, writing a full review that left me feeling both honored and humbled.

Here is the full review:

It’s July 20, 1969, and we return to Perry Hollow in a dreamy, shimmering opening scene where Neil Armstrong is making history. But as the television in the Olmstead living room casts its eerie light, a much bigger drama is unfolding. Ten-year-old Charlie has taken off on his bicycle, certain that he can see the astronaut bouncing along the surface of the glowing full moon. He doesn’t come home. And on that night, when the world was staring in wonder at the heavens, Charlie’s mother was running through the streets of Perry Hollows, looking for her son. She never found him.

For a mother, the loss of a child is a far more impacting event than the first moon walk. And though the authorities and the rest of the town thought that Charlie was lost to an accident that night — his mother, Maggie, never believed it. She spent her whole life secretly searching for her son, for some kind of closure that never came. In BAD MOON, Todd Ritter’s compelling follow-up to last year’s acclaimed DEATH NOTICE, most everyone is carrying that same burden, looking for answers that may or may not ever come.

More than 40 years after Charlie’s disappearance, his brother, bestselling novelist Eric Olmstead, has returned home to honor his mother’s dying wish: FIND HIM. He enlists the help of Nick Donnelly who, after losing his job with the state police, dedicates his life to solving cold cases. He, too, may be seeking a kind of closure in helping grieving families find answers when everyone else has given up. He knows what it’s like to live with haunting questions.

Enter Perry Hollow Police Chief Kat Campbell. Her own father ran the 1969 investigation into Charlie’s disappearance; and in following his notes, she realizes that he overlooked — or ignored — critical clues. But why? To complicate matters, Eric and Kat share a history themselves, a painful one she’d rather forget. The past, it seems, wants to find a way out of the grave to wrap itself around the present.

Ritter delves deep into the veiled, complicated lives of Perry Hollows residents. And in doing so he tackles some big themes: What does it mean to be someone’s parent? And what does it mean to be someone’s child? How far will we go to hide the truth about ourselves and the people we love? In this complex, and expertly plotted outing, Todd Ritter explores these matters with a deft hand, never letting the suspense lag for even a moment — right through to the astonishing conclusion.

Lisa Unger is an award-winning New York Times and international bestselling author. Her novels have sold over 1 million copies in the U.S. and have been translated into 26 different languages. Her writing has been hailed as “masterful” (St. Petersburg Times), “sensational” (Publishers Weekly) and “sophisticated” (New York Daily News) with “gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose” (Associated Press). For more information about Lisa and her books, visit her website, www.lisaunger.com.