Trigger warning for brief depictions of interpersonal violence.
The Night Flowers, by Sara Herchenroether, tells several stories at the same time. There’s the story of Jean Martinez, a detective who is one of the few who isn’t getting too old for this shit in spite of her husband’s hope that they can retire together. There’s the story of Laura McDonald, a genealogist and librarian in the early stages of recovery from treatment for breast cancer. And there’s the story of an unknown woman and two children whose remains are found in a New Mexico national forest in the early 1980s. The three stories converge with the possibility of not only giving the unknown woman and children their names back but also, maybe, justice after almost fifty years.
Herchenroether creates three distinct and complicated protagonists in Jean, Laura, and the unknown woman. Each chapter advances what we know about the cold case and reveals all of the other things that the women are coping with. In addition to working on cold cases with few resources, Jean also has to contend with a husband pressuring her to hang up her spurs and a pregnant daughter hoping for motherly support. Laura, meanwhile, is struggling with insensitive and inattentive doctors who put her life at risk as they perform reconstructing surgery on her breasts after she finishes chemotherapy and radiation treatments for cancer. Laura would much rather be working with genealogical databases and public records to give names to unknown Jane Does than dealing with recovery from treatments and surgeries and neuropathy. In interstitial chapters, the unknown woman appears as a ghost stuck with her ghostly children in the place where their remains were found. She is the most reluctant to let us into her story, preferring to use the little power she has to keep more people out of the hands of the man who killed her and her children—and who still regularly visits the spot where he left their remains so many years before.
I appreciated the two investigative methods Jean and Laura used to find out who the unknown woman and children were. Jean is very much a shoe-leather detective. She visits all of the places her case touches. She talks to anyone who might know something. She collates and analyzes every scrap of evidence for clues. Laura is more the type to make wild leaps of intuition from the few pieces of information she can glean as a librarian. (As a librarian myself, albeit a different kind, I raised my eyebrows more than once at the kinds of information Laura has access to. I’m pretty sure some of the records Laura uses aren’t publicly available and won’t be for a few decades yet.) It was a lot of fun to see their styles clash once Laura ups stakes and heads for New Mexico with her findings.
The Night Flowers is an original, emotionally affecting mystery. I would definitely recommend it to mystery and true crime fans who are tired of the usual fare.