In Amy Rivers’s award-winning 2021 novel Complicit, a high school student disappears, leaving the community in crisis. Kate Medina, a school psychologist with a traumatic past, works with Roman Aguilar, the lead detective, on the search. When the girl’s body is found, turning a missing-person case into a murder investigation, things get more intense–and more dangerous.
In this sequel, Kate is working on renovating her New Mexico home, which she bought with money earned from the sale of her deceased father’s house. Roman is helping, having been forced to resign his position due to his romantic involvement with Kate, who had lost her job for the same reason. Yet they had caught the student’s killer, and the guy was behind bars. Kate has opened her own practice, and Roman has a chance to join the FBI. Everything seems fine–until another missing young woman cranks up the tension, endangering not just Kate but her troubled sister Tilly.
Crime fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, and comic book movies all have one thing in common: their success relies on a strong villain. The Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Voldemort–the evil these guys exude seems indomitable, which is why we find the efforts to defeat them so compelling. STUMBLE AND FALL has traditional crime-story wrongdoing, but the real villain is violence against women. Tilly, like Rivers herself, works as a SANE–a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner. Kate also specializes in sexual assault. Both, moreover, are abuse survivors. “I didn’t think it would be this bad,” Tilly muses about her recovery efforts, “but that’s the thing about processing trauma. You’re never done.” This, rather than some cat-and-mouse game with, say, a serial killer, is the heart of the book. That sort of conflict is hard to pull off, but Rivers shows herself equal to the task by making the reader care, really care, about Kate’s and Tilly’s plights. Readers who primarily interest are about cat-and-mouse games may lose focus, as the abduction hinted at in the prologue isn’t mentioned again until page 155, over halfway through the book. Rivers’s messages of hope and strength, however, are excellent compensation.
Part traditional crime story, part study in trauma recovery, STUMBLE AND FALL satisfies readers at both levels, offering a portrait of humanity at its best and worst.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader