Hester Young: CHARLIE CATES TRILOGY

Author:  Hester Young 
Series:  CHARLIE CATES TRILOGY 

Plot Type: Romantic Paranormal Mystery/Thriller

Ratings:  Violence—3; Sensuality—3; Humor—2 
Publisher:  G.P. Putnam's Sons (Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC) 
    1  The Gates of Evangeline (9/2015) 

    2  The Shimmering Road (2/2017)

This ongoing post was updated on 3/1/2017 to include a review of The Shimmering Road, the second novel in the trilogy. That review appears first, followed by a brief overview of the world-building and a review of the first novel.

                    NOVEL 2: The Shimmering Road                    
PUBLISHER'S BLURB:  

     A pulse-pounding mystery from the author of The Gates of Evangeline featuring Charlotte “Charlie” Cates, an unforgettable heroine whose dark visions bring to light secrets that will save or destroy those around her. 

     When soon-to-be mother Charlotte “Charlie” Cates begins to have recurring dreams about harm coming to her unborn daughter, she knows these are not the nightmares of an anxious mom-to-be. They are the result of her mysterious gift. But before she can decipher what these dreams might mean, Charlie learns that the mother who abandoned her when she was a toddler is the victim of a double murder in Arizona. The other victim—Jasmine, a half-sister Charlie never knew she had—has left behind a child, a little girl who speaks to Charlie in her dreams and was present on the night of the murders. Convinced that she must help her orphaned niece, Charlie travels to Tucson, Arizona, where she must confront her painful ties to her mother and delve into her sister’s shadowy past.

     To untangle the web of secrets that will reveal the truth of her nightmares, Charlie can no longer avoid her family’s checkered history. Who is in the racy photos that turned up in Jasmine’s apartment? Where is her niece’s father, whom Jasmine was rumored to have been seeing again on the sly? Was her mother’s charity work in Mexico really as selfless as it seemed? And most important of all, what did her niece really witness on the night of the murders?

     The search for answers leads Charlie across the Mexican border, from the resort town of Rocky Point to the border town of Nogales, and elucidates the meaning of her dreams in most unexpected ways. Ultimately, to protect her niece and her unborn child, Charlie must battle not just evil but the forces of nature, in one final terrifying encounter in the Tucson desert.

     A thrilling mystery that combines literary suspense and romance with a mystical twist that is unputdownable. If you love Kate Atkinson and Alice Sebold, you should not miss Hester Young.

MY REVIEW: 

     The story begins about eight months after the ending of The Gates of Evangeline. Charlie is now living in Sidalie, Texas, with her baby daddy, Noah Palmer. Yes, Charlie is 34 weeks pregnant—the result of an alcohol-fueled night of unprotected sex with Noah back in New Orleans. Although they were blindsided by the pregnancy, their budding romance has, so far, survived, and even blossomed. Noah is pushing for marriage, but Charlie isn't ready to commit to a new relationship that might fail just as badly as her first marriage. The author divides the novel into seven parts, all based on the geographical location of the action, which moves back and forth among four locations: Sidalie; Tucson, Arizona; Sonora, Mexico; and Nogales, Mexico.

     Once again, Charlie is having nightmares about the death of a child—this time her own child—her unborn baby girl. In her recurring dream, Charlie is always taking a shower in the same bathroom when she is shot three times and dies. She has shared the dream with Noah, who fully believes in her visions (because he has seen them come true), and they are both on the lookout for the specific blue-and-yellow-tiled shower that appears in that nightmare.

     In Part I, Charlie has a new dream. This one features a small dark-haired child walking through puddles of blood in search of her mother. The next morning, Charlie's Aunt Suzie calls to inform her that Charlie's mother (Donna) and her half-sister (Jasmine) are dead—shot by an unknown murderer in Jasmine's Tucson apartment. Naturally, this is a huge shock for Charlie. Donna left town when Charlie was just an infant, and she has neither seen nor heard from Donna since. Even worse, Charlie never even knew that Jasmine existed. Adding to the tragedy, Jasmine's young daughter (Micky) was in the apartment when the shootings occurred and may have seen or heard the killer. (Notice the connection between the murder and Charlie's nightmare.) Micky has been placed in foster care, but Charlie and Noah agree that since she is part of Charlie's family, they need to go to Tucson and scope out the situation with an eye toward a possible adoption.

     When Charlie and Noah get to Tucson, they gradually get drawn into the murder investigation, which the police are treating as a drug-related crime (because a hoard of Rohypnol was found in the apartment). But as Charlie meets Donna's friends and learns about her life as an advocate for abused women, Charlie isn't so sure that the police are on the right track. Then Charlie begins to have dreams about a dead girl—one of Donna's clients—who supposedly killed herself. The girl lets Charlie know that her death was murder, not suicide, and begs Charlie to help her younger sister. As Charlie and Noah wade deeper and deeper into the case, their own lives become endangered.

     Young has created a complex mystery/thriller with a well-drawn set of likely suspects who will keep you guessing all the way to the end of the story. Who was the real target of the murderer, Jasmine or Donna? Was Jasmine using/selling drugs? Was Donna? Is Jasmine's aggressive boyfriend (a policeman) involved in the crime? Why is his partner following Charlie? Who is the threatening man in the pineapple-printed, Hawaiian shirt? From the moment she involves herself in the investigation, Charlie can't trust anyone because she finds that they are all holding back information and keeping dark, personal secrets.

     Charlie is particularly conflicted in her feelings about her mother. Did Donna truly clean up her life, or did she drop back into her old habits of drug and alcohol abuse? As she listens to Donna's Tucson friends extol Donna for her compassionate work for the abused women of Nogales, Charlie muses, "Why couldn't my long-lost mother be a junkie, a self-involved bitch, some cheap and stupid floozy I'd never miss? Did she really have to Do Good Things? To have been a positive influence in the life of a child? If my mother had value as a human being, if she could demonstrate kindness and compassion in her life, where does that leave me, the daughter she discarded and forgot?" But then more clues accumulate that cast a darker light on Donna's activities in Nogales, and Charlie wonders, "Who were you, Donna?...Were you good or were you bad? a saint or sinner? And the biggest question of all: "Who killed you?" 

     Meanwhile, Noah is desperate to keep Charlie and their unborn baby safe, while Charlie is just as determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. Adding to the friction between Charlie and Noah is Carmen, Noah's gorgeous ex-wife. She is an attorney who enters the story at a critical time to help save Noah from being sent to jail for a crime he didn't commit. 

     Charlie is writer, so she always notices the mundane details of life, particularly in her descriptions of various people she meets. I don't mean to pick on realtors, but here are Charlie's descriptions of two of them. In Sedalie: "Brandi Babcock may possess the name of a porn star, but she has the body of a butternut squash, a solid top that flares out into an epically large backside." And in Tucson: "He wears a golf shirt, khaki shorts, and large aviator sunglasses, and his hair is slick with gel....he smells like a frat boy—Axe body spray or something like that. His skin emits waves so intense that I wonder briefly if my gestating child will suffer grave birth defects with prolonged exposure."

     Young has created a suspense-filled thriller in which her intelligent and adventurous heroine deals with burgeoning pregnancy while listening to the women and children in her visionary dreams and doing her best to save them. I have to admit, I thought that I had figured out the bad-guy situation several times, but was always wrong—so wrong! My advice is to keep guessing, but relax and trust Young to roll out the mystery slowly and carefully, rewarding you with a big slam-bang ending that will answer all of your questions. Warning: If you are in the habit of reading the ending first, you will hate yourself because that would defuse the suspense and take all of the joy out of Young's meticulous, tension-filled build-up to the big reveal scene.

A dwelling at the
Tirabichi dump.

Child waste-pickers gather
recyclables at Tirabichi.

    Click HERE to read Frost Magazine's "A Day in the Life/Hester Young" photo essay that follows the author as she visits southern Arizona and the Mexico borderlands to research the compelling scenes set in the settlement that formerly existed at the Tirabichi garbage dump just outside Nogales. Here is Charlie's description: "I see it all in three vivid dimensions: the mountains of trash, the human dwellings constructed from waste, the trees adorned with whatever plastic bags caught a breeze, and the strangely pastoral green hills rolling in the valley below. This is the stuff of postapocalyptic action movies, the kind of bleak and gritty setting Hollywood directors spend millions trying to achieve, only with more sunlight, more color."

     Click HERE to go to this novel's Amazon.com page where you can read or listen to an excerpt by clicking on either the cover art for print or the "Listen" icon for audio.

                          WORLD-BUILDING                              

     Young's inspiration for the first novel in this series comes from a recurring dream her grandmother had about the death of one of her sons. She constantly dreamed that he fell from an open window, and eventually that is exactly what happened. After his death, Young's grandmother never dreamed that dream again. 

     As the series opens, the heroine―Charlotte "Charlie" Cates―is trying to pull her life back together several months after her four-year-old son, Keegan, dies suddenly from a brain aneurysm. Charlie, who is divorced from Keegan's cheating father, has only one other relative, her grandmother, who is in a local assisted living facility. Charlie's mother deserted her during her early childhood, and her father was an alcoholic who died in an alcohol-fueled auto wreck when she was just fourteen. From that point on, her grandmother raised her.

     Several months after Keegan's death, Charlie begins having premonitory dreams about children. Unlike Young's grandmother, Charlie's dreams are not about her son. Instead, she has prophetic dreams about familiar and unfamiliar children, both dead and alive, many of whom speak to her and ask her to help them. 

     In an online guest blog, Young shares her thoughts on fictional heroines: “I’ve always enjoyed female characters who, for better or for worse, actively shape their own fate. Don’t give me a heroine who finds herself paralyzed by fear—at least let her try to smash the bad guy in the head with a lamp. The fictional women I want to spend my time with may not be entirely wholesome rays of sunshine, but they are resourceful, courageous, clever. They are individuals and not accessories." Charlie Cates certainly lives up to Young's description. As she tells her story in her wry, self-aware, first-person voice, we watch her set up her investigation, draw conclusions (frequently not the correct ones) from the clues she gathers, and begin to make friends in this new life she is developing for herself. 

                        NOVEL 1:  The Gates of Evangeline                             PUBLISHER'S BLURB: 
     From a unique new talent comes a fast-paced debut, introducing a heroine whose dark visions bring to light secrets that will heal or destroy those around her. 

     When grieving mother and New York journalist Charlie Cates begins to experience vivid dreams about children after her only son passes away, she’s sure that she’s lost her mind. Yet she soon realizes these are not the hallucinations of a bereaved mother. They are messages and warnings that will help Charlie and the children she sees―if she can make sense of them. 

     The disturbing images lead her from her home in suburban New York City to small-town Louisiana, where she takes a commission to write a true-crime book based on the case of Gabriel Deveau, the young heir to a wealthy and infamous Southern family, whose kidnapping thirty years ago has never been solved. There she meets the Deveau family, none of whom are telling the full truth about the night Gabriel disappeared. And as she uncovers long-buried secrets of love, money, betrayal, and murder, the facts begin to implicate those she most wants to trust―and her visions reveal an evil closer than she could have imagined.

     A Southern Gothic mystery debut that combines literary suspense and romance with a mystical twist, The Gates of Evangeline is a story that readers of Gillian Flynn, Kate Atkinson, and Alice Sebold won't be able to put down. 

     Click HERE and scroll down to read an the prologue and chapter one of this novel, or click HERE to listen to January LaVoy read that same excerpt aloud. (Note: LaVoy also narrates Kim Harrison's new series, PERI REED CHRONICLES.)

MY REVIEW:

Charlie's dream about
the little boy in the swamp

     As this this Southern Gothic thriller opens, Charlie is living in Stamford, Connecticut, so grief-stricken over her son's death that she has nearly lost the will to keep up a normal life. Her professional life as managing editor of a Cosmopolitan-like magazine is no longer appealing, but when an old friend offers her a job writing a book about the disappearance of a young Louisiana boy thirty years ago, she almost turns him down. Then, she dreams about a dead boy who has been drowned in a swamp, probably by a sexual abuser: "A picture forms. Swamp. I'm in a rowboat, drifting through brown water and swirls of green scum. Around me I see dead leaves, rotted branches curling like fingers, partially submerged trees clawing their way upward. On my right, I catch a flash of movement. Watchful green eyes peer up at me. An alligator." The little boy is glad to see her: "Will you help me?…He hurt me…You gotta tell on him." As Charlie awakens and the dream fades away, she wonders if this boy could be Gabriel Deveau, the two-year old toddler who disappeared three decades ago. Charlie's dream is so powerful that it makes her accept the writing job and a three-month-long visit to the bayou country of southern Louisiana. 

     The book is divided into four sections. The first and last are set in Stamford, Connecticut, where Charlie currently resides. The middle two sections are set in on the Deveau estate in Chicory, Louisiana. There, Charlie moves into a small cottage on the estate grounds and meets the members of the spectacularly dysfunctional Deveau family and their staff. As she investigates the case, she develops close relationships with two men: Remy Minot, a local police detective who has been assigned to reopen the investigation of Gabriel's disappearance, and Noah Palmer, a Texas landscaper hired by Hettie Deveau, the dying family matriarch, to restore the estate gardens to their former glory. One becomes her friend and ally, and the other becomes her lover.

     Young has created a Southern Gothic novel that drips with atmosphere: "The trees thicken, forming a dense canopy. Spanish moss drapes down, gloomy and majestic...The swamp creeps closer and closer...The silence is, to a city dweller, unearthly. No birds, no rushing water. Only stillness. I...gaze at the green-brown water. There's a smell I don't like, a dank and almost moldy odor, like someone's leaky basement." When she reaches the gated estate, she sees the white-pillared, French-windowed house "waiting at the end of the drive, lovely and white, half shielded by the trees. An elegant, expectant ghost of a home." In a scene set inside the Deveau mansion, someone pulls the drapes open to let in some light, "but the study's dark and somber furnishings expertly fend off natural light. It is a room for migraine-ridden women, scholars burning the midnight oil, grave old white men weighing matters of political and economic import." 

    The Deveau siblings are a disagreeable lot: twin sisters—one stridently dissatisfied with her life and the other smug and pretentious—and their in-the-closet older brother, who runs the family hotel business. All of them are harboring secrets, some harmless and some devastating, and it's up to Charlie to dig deep enough to bring those secrets into the light—an intense and sometimes dangerous task.

     As Charlie narrates her way through her investigation and her love life, we get to know her in a very personal way—her grief over Keegan's death, the big shift in her feelings of distrust for close friendships, and her blossoming emotions as she begins to fall in love. When she thinks about Keegan, she grieves, "No one told me then, He's yours, for four years. He's yours, but not for long. I am not by nature an optimistic or hopeful person, but when I held my child, I believed absolutely in the future. His future." All through the book, Charlie wrestles with her beliefs about the role of God and the ramifications of religious faith. She meets Justine, a religious woman who has lost her daughter, Didi, and wonders "How can you pray to a God…who is so unfair? How can you look in Didi's empty bedroom and see any reason, any purpose? It isn't a rhetorical question—I really want to know the answer. Justine told me that prayer gives her comfort, but I can't imagine seeking solace from the being who orchestrated my misery."

     Charlie is a richly drawn protagonist, always alert to the everyday details of life. For example, when she and Noah stop at a local restaurant, they are waited on by a puffy-eyed, hung-over teenager "who has a faraway look like she's mentally composing a suicide note." (Haven't we all met that waitress?) When Charlie stops in at the local library to do some research, "The gray-haired woman at the reference desk…wears a purple turtleneck with a garish studded snowflake pin that only a teacher, librarian, or grandmother would find attractive." (Yes, that can be construed as a stereotypical statement, but still…I know exactly what that pin looks like.)

     But there is a major problem with most of the people with whom she interacts: very few of them are telling the whole truth about themselves, and some are telling outright lies. Young does a masterful job with her plotting, keeping the reader in deep suspense all the way up to the final scene. Although I made some close guesses about the truth of the kidnapping—which is at the heart of the plot—many aspects of the final resolution surprised me.

     On the downside, Young wraps up that resolution a bit too neatly. It's hard to imagine—even in a tiny bayou town—that in the face of the deadly final events, most of the details are kept hidden from public knowledge and from law enforcement. But that didn't bother me as much as, perhaps, it should because I truly enjoyed every page-turning scene, from beginning to end.

     Young gives us a haunting, sometimes heartbreaking, tale in which her smart and adventurous heroine follows her dreams as she introduces us to a wealth of quirky characters and ferrets out chilling answers to dark questions that have been kept secret for thirty long years. As one reviewer has written, "Eerie and haunting, the novel is as addictive as mint juleps served by servants in white gloves on the veranda—and just as creepy." This is a terrific debut novel from an up-and-coming author. Its mix of eerie Gothic and ghostly elements, amateur sleuth and whodunit tropes, moral and religious issues, murder, and betrayal will grab you by the throat from the very beginning and take you on a wild ride through the bayous. 

  Here are some links to interviews with and guest blogs by the author on the subject of this novel:

     > Click HERE to read an interview on the Shelf Awareness web site. 

     > Click HERE to read Young's guest blog on Dead Good Books.

     > Click HERE to read Young's interview with Publishers Weekly. 

     > Click HERE to read Young's interview with Shelf-Awareness.