The Weight of Blood

A Novel

By: Laura McHugh

Narrated by: Dorothy Dillingham Blue, Shannon McManus, Sofia Willingham

Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

For fans of Gillian Flynn, Scott Smith, and Daniel Woodrell comes a gripping, suspenseful novel about two mysterious disappearances a generation apart.

INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS AWARD WINNER AND BARRY AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE

The town of Henbane sits deep in the Ozark Mountains. Folks there still whisper about Lucy Dane’s mother, a bewitching stranger who appeared long enough to marry Carl Dane and then vanished when Lucy was just a child. Now on the brink of adulthood, Lucy experiences another loss when her friend Cheri disappears and is then found murdered, her body placed on display for all to see. Lucy’s family has deep roots in the Ozarks, part of a community that is fiercely protective of its own. Yet despite her close ties to the land, and despite her family’s influence, Lucy—darkly beautiful as her mother was—is always thought of by those around her as her mother’s daughter. When Cheri disappears, Lucy is haunted by the two lost girls—the mother she never knew and the friend she couldn’t save—and sets out with the help of a local boy, Daniel, to uncover the mystery behind Cheri’s death.

What Lucy discovers is a secret that pervades the secluded Missouri hills, and beyond that horrific revelation is a more personal one concerning what happened to her mother more than a decade earlier.

The Weight of Blood is an urgent look at the dark side of a bucolic landscape beyond the arm of the law, where a person can easily disappear without a trace. Laura McHugh proves herself a masterly storyteller who has created a harsh and tangled terrain as alive and unforgettable as the characters who inhabit it. Her mesmerizing debut is a compelling exploration of the meaning of family: the sacrifices we make, the secrets we keep, and the lengths to which we will go to protect the ones we love.

©2014 Laura McHugh (P)2014 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“[An] expertly crafted thriller.”—Entertainment Weekly, “The Must List”

“With her riveting debut, The Weight of Blood, Laura McHugh makes a strong bid at cementing a new tradition of regional crime fiction while keeping tourism low in the Ozarks. . . . [A] powerful sense of place is the anchor of The Weight of Blood. The well-drawn townspeople and oppressive, dread-soaked atmosphere sprout from the soil of Henbane. . . . The prose is strong, with evocative paint strokes in all the right places. McHugh is an artful, efficient writer who tells her story in vicious blows. . . . McHugh has crafted a sharp, haunting tale of blood in the Ozarks, as substantial as it is pleasurable to read.”—Los Angeles Times

“Laura McHugh’s atmospheric debut, The Weight of Blood . . . conjures a menacingly beautiful Ozark setting and a nest of poisonous family secrets reminiscent of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone.”—Vogue

Great Book

This is one of my most favorite books of 2014. It was perfect and had everything I like about a book. I also love when they use different people to narrate different characters in a book.

Crazy family.

Any additional comments?

I love it when the books have more then one narrater to read the story, it become so much better to listen to!

Somewhat entertaining

I enjoyed the first half of the book and then it got long in the tooth. Entertaining but predictable.

BEWARE

This book contains graphic scenes of teen girls being raped and tortured in a human trafficking ring. I do not find this enjoyable or a nice escape.

awful book

this book is one of the most boring books I have ever listen to I would not recommend this to anyone Arrowhead one of her other books was very good this was quite a disappointment

YA Novel with grown up pretensions

What disappointed you about The Weight of Blood?

At first I was drawn into the story; however, it quickly developed into a YA novel with grownup crimes. The teenage romance was boring. I felt as if I was reading Nancy Drew discovers sex crimes. Also, I found it hard to detemine the time frame of the actions: when was Lila the victim; when is Lucy a teenager? The ending was very deus ex machina - a tornado which blows away all the loose ends. I would not recommend this to any of my reading group.

What didn’t you like about the narrators’s performance?

The persistent little girl voice that seem to dominate all the characters.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

I think the author has talent. However, this book was marketed as a mystery/thriller/gothic and I just got young adult / teenage angst.

Totally maddeing.

Even if it had not been revealed early on, the reader would still easily figure out the "truths" (that it takes everyone else in the book forever to piece together) pretty much from the start. There are absolutely no surprises in this book - not because I'm an expert at anticipating plot twists, but apparently that was the author's intention. Tell the reader everything, then let them sit back while the bumbling characters trip over each other trying to sort it out themselves without ever employing any sort of logic.

If that sense of "come on, figure it out!!" that persists through the whole book weren't annoying enough, the book is filled with phrases like "she considered telling him, but couldn't find the words" or "she wanted to tell him what she'd found, but thought better of it" for absolutely no reason. If any of the characters had actually talked to each other like normal people do in the real world, this book would have been over by the end of the first chapter. Instead, everyone inexplicably chooses silence, thus accepting some horrible fate when a simple explanation could have solved everything from the beginning.

My last complaint would be the overly-stereotypical country-folk. This book claims to be set very near where I'm from, and they did get certain things right. The old wives tales about the shape in the middle of a persimmon seed predicting the winter, or the way a pendant swings predicting the gender of a baby - I'll give you that. But everyone eating squirrel and possum?? C'mon.

Not What I Expected

I had just listened to Sycamore Row by John Grisham and thought that this would be a similarly suspenseful novel. I was disappointed. At first I was confused between the two characters of Lila (mom) and Lucy (daughter). The author may have helped by picking two names that were not so similar. The story is being told with two different time frames in parallel. I was also disappointed with the ending although I cannot give it away. There was not one character that I felt was an actual hero in this story. They all just lacked a certain degree of backbone.

Nancy Drew in the Ozarks

The author had an interesting premise for a mystery with a potentially atmospheric setting. But she failed to fulfill that promise through uneven pacing and mediocre character development. Using the mother-daughter narrative lines to relate two separate disappearances allowed us to experience the mysteries of both, but also formed a relentlessly symmetric feel to the whole, right down to the father-boyfriend connections. These four characters were so similar as to be interchangeable, and all of the supporting characters remained flat. There was no sense of time passing because the two story lines sounded exactly alike. Clues dropped too early placed the reader so far ahead in the plot that the effect was of impatience for the characters to catch up rather than feeling the tension of a plot thickening.

There should have been a much darker tone to a story filled with such nasty goings-on in a region that is close minded and superstitious. Especially since the community supposedly thought of the first vanished woman as a witch, just because she appeared from the exotic planet of Iowa. But the tone was not dark, and the residents of the small town just came across as rude, not fearfully superstitious. At one point as Lucy is digging into her mother’s mystery, she made a “Nancy Drew” reference to herself, and that encapsulated what I found wrong with this story – a YA level plot trying to be grown up. I pushed through to the end, but it felt like a push with an ultimately disappointing ending.