Written by Bryan Gruley — A teenager goes missing and his family are in bits. Could be the summary of a number of this year’s releases, couldn’t it? Fear not, because Bleak Harbor is about to bring something new to the party.

Danny is 15 and lives in Bleak Harbor, a small town in Michigan made famous by the annual Dragonfly Festival which attracts visitors from far and wide. Danny is autistic and he loves dragonflies, tourists not so much. He will be 16 in a couple of days but events are about to unfold that will change his life for ever.

Until recently, Danny, his mother Carey and stepfather Pete lived in Chicago. Then Pete lost his job as a trader and used his payoff money to set up a business selling medical marijuana. It meant a move to Bleak Harbor, a place which has special significance for Carey. It’s where she was born and brought up, where her brother Jonah is mayor and where her mother lives, ensconced in a huge mansion, doing her best to ignore her daughter, son and grandson. Carey’s maiden name was Bleak, and her family created the town in which she now reluctantly lives.

Carey’s mother, Serenity, is in bad health and sees her imminent demise as a way to preserve her name for posterity. She has decided to cut her family out of her will, leaving her huge fortune to Bleak Harbor and other nearby towns on the proviso that they chance their names to a something with Serenity in the title. She sounds like a cross between Barbara Cartland, Miss Haversham and Mr Burns in The Simpsons – not the nicest of combinations, I think you’ll agree.

Carey is commuting each day to Chicago, where her job at a logistics firm is under pressure after she slept with the boss. She has a plan to sort that though and it involves blackmail and a payoff in the millions of dollars. Meanwhile, Pete’s medical marijuana business has hit the buffers and the dodgy dealer he turned to in the hope of getting himself out of the financial mire is now playing dirty and demanding money. Is it any wonder that Danny seems forgotten in everything else that’s going on?

Then he goes missing, followed by a ransom demand for the peculiar amount of $5,150,122.98. The note is signed by Jeremiah, and as this tale progresses it becomes clear Danny’s abductor knows an awful lot about everything that’s going on in the Peters family…

You’ll find your resolve wavering like seaweed in an ebb tide as the narrative unfolds. Every now and then there’s a eureka moment and the pieces appear to slot neatly in place – but don’t be feeling too smug about things, because in Gruley we have an author who surely has a Masters degree in the art of misdirection. As I said at the outset, this is not your common or garden hostage story.

Crime writers love a dysfunctional family and Serenity Bleak and her children come pretty high in that pecking order. Everyone has something to hide and it’s a pleasure to be along for the ride as, one after another, those dirty secrets come out in the open. In addition to the central cast, there’s a second string of characters who all have a vital part to play, from troubled police officer Katya Malone, just back at work after a personal tragedy, through Boz at Boz’s Bar, to shady computer hacker Quartz, Casey’s ex Jeffrey Bledsoe and her lech of a boss Randall Pressman. At the heart of it all is Danny, whose autism has set him apart from everyone he knows and loves for far too long.

Bryan Gruley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned author and his writing skills shine through in a book that has more twists and turns than an unravelling piece of rope. It’s tricksy, taut and tantalisingly good. Could be a late contender for my book of the year.

Lost people feature in plenty of crime novels. Why not try The Chosen Ones by Howard Lynskey or Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey?

Thomas & Mercer
Print/Kindle/iBook
£3.98

CFL Rating: 5 Stars

Bleak Harbor, a psychological thriller by award-winning author Bryan Gruley, begins when Carey Peters’ autistic, but brilliant son, Danny is kidnapped, and she and her husband, Pete (Danny’s Stepfather) are frantically trying to raise the money to pay the ransom. Danny is the youngest of the Bleaks, the founding family of the small town of Bleak Harbor, and while his grandmother has money, Carey has been written out of the will and is estranged from her mother. Carey works for a firm where her boss has illegal dealings, so by essentially blackmailing him, she feels like she may be able to raise the ransom money without her mother’s help. Both Carey and Pete are receiving texts with disturbing pictures of Danny, and both fear that if the money isn’t raised, Danny will be killed.

Gruley has done an excellent job of developing his characters; they are not perfect – Pete is a drunk and is at the bar when Danny is kidnapped; Carey slept with her boss once, and fears the consequences. Danny’s birth father is also involved, and he is characterized as a scumbag. Pete and Carey’s marriage isn’t the best, and they both feel partly responsible for Danny’s disappearance. Actually, Neither Pete nor Carey are particularly likeable, but both have good intentions when it comes to Danny because they clearly do love him.

The story is quite fascinating, and there are plenty of unexpected twists and turns. Readers will have ideas about who the kidnapper is, and the reasons for the kidnapping, but the dénouement is surprising and unexpected. Most of the novel will keep readers on the edge of their seats, and guessing most of the way through. Gruley is a good storyteller and has the ability to keep the reader’s interest throughout.

All told, Bleak Harbor is a thriller that will appeal to most thriller aficionados and, while it probably won’t turn out to be a classic bestseller, it is worth reading and has a few different scenarios that will make the novel memorable and unique.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.

I am a big fan of the television show “Ozark”. The writing is superb, the cast stellar. The characters are often frustrating, and it’s a bit bizarre when you find yourself regretting a drug lord getting murdered because he was just such an entertaining figure.

In a way, the tone of Bryan Gruley’s novel reminds me of my guilty pleasure show. The setting is quite a ways from Missouri, in southern Michigan. Andrew ‘Pete’ Peters, after failing as a financial advisor, decides to take his family away from Chicago to open a pot shop. While Pete is struggling with his business, wife Carey is struggling with her weekly commute back to Chi-Town, where she is loathe to quit her job and attempting to blackmail her employer. Meanwhile, son Danny is struggling to maintain his mental balance after the death of his beloved dog. When Danny is kidnapped, the Peters family suddenly finds that there is no such thing as a small lie and that there really are skeletons in everyone’s closets.

Just like in “Ozark”, there are plenty of times when the characters get so frustrating that you just want to toss Gruley’s book at them and tell them to get their act together already. This is not a bad thing! In fact, I found characters and plot quite engaging, even if the pacing seemed a bit uneven at times. The penultimate twist of the thing is delicious, even if it wasn’t too difficult to figure out, especially if you’re a seasoned viewer of crime dramas. The one thing that left me oddly unsatisfied is the very ending, which seems a tad contrived, but is probably meant to set up a sequel.

If you enjoy a gritty crime story paired with dirty family laundry, you’re going to love this book!

“Bleak Harbor” is published by Thomas & Mercer. I received an ARC in exchange for a review. All views are, needless to say, my own.

A young, brilliant autistic man is kidnapped and his captors provide disturbing pictures to his wealthy parents. As if that weren't bad enough, the captors are also bombarding the parents with notes containing family secrets that no one else could possibly know (and even some secrets kept by one parent from the other). Tension escalates as the parents become more and more desperate to free their son and still manage to save the family from disintegration. Great book.

Bleak Harbor is a suspenseful book with a cast of characters that each have their own secrets. This is my first book to read by Bryan Gruley. I liked his writing style which kept me anxiously wondering what would happen next.

There were lots of characters in this book and I didn't really find any of them likeable. That made it hard for me to care much what happened to them. Everybody had secrets and unsavory pasts. Everyone seemed to be more interested in keeping their secrets than in finding Danny.

There was suspense and tension in the book but it was complicated with the multitude of characters and all the little side stories that weren't really very interesting. I understand this is the first book of a series so perhaps the author was setting up this book with questions to be answered in future books.

Do Some Damage post
http://www.dosomedamage.com/2018/12/the-one-that-got-away-to-bleak-harbor.html

Modern bookstores have sections for mystery, for literature, for celebrity cookbooks. They could just as easily devote a large section of their floorspace to novels about stressed-but-brilliant mothers caring for a special needs child while the father is mostly useless. I've read roughly 87 of these types of books in the last two years. They're very popular in the domestic thriller circle. The mother is smart and capable, balancing her care-giving with her professional strength to hold together her family, which includes a special needs child. Meanwhile, the father is overwhelmed, seeking solace in drugs, alcohol, and lovely women who often end up corpses or blackmailers. Now, some of these have been done quite well. Those are the exception in terms of quality, though they all seem to sell just fine. With that in mind, I have to admit that the first few dozen pages of Gruley's new novel had me worried. Which, as it turns out, was unnecessary.

Gruley doesn't short any of the characters in his novel, despite the fact that a dozen of them take center stage at various parts of the story. Pete and Carey Peters's son is taken. While they do work together to find him, they also work separately, down various tracks, many of them competing with each other. Gruley's novel is twisty and mesmerizing, and I can't begin to imagine how he organized the different threads throughout.

Pete and Carey each have secrets that this kidnapping threatens to expose, and they each work to navigate back through those secrets as they try to save their son. The shifting narratives create clean cliff-hanger points, a structure that helps to keep this book moving. The reader hops into one narrative, seeing all the dark places in a character's past that look close to exploding, only to shift in the next chapter to someone else, someone else with secrets to hide. It's the sort of "ok, just one more chapter" book that readers tend to devour.

4.5*
The prologue sets the scene for a kidnapping so we know something bad is about to happen, but not who the perpetrators are. Carey Bleak Peters, her husband Pete and teenage son Danny, who is on the autism spectrum, have moved back to Bleak Harbor from Chicago. Carey is descended from the founder of the town but her mother, the reclusive Serenity Bleak, is the sole heir to the family fortune built up over the years. She has no interest in her grandson and no plans to pass her fortune on to Carey or her brother Jonah, the mayor of Bleak Harbour.

Both Pete and Carey are struggling with unresolved and potentially dangerous work related issues. In fact, most of the characters, and there are a good many introduced along the way, have issues of one sort or another and none of them appear to have many principles. When Danny disappears Carey and Pete want to believe he’s gone walkabout as he has before, but then they both begin to receive odd and sometimes ominous texts.

What starts off as a seemingly obvious case of kidnapping with a demand for an extremely large ransom, quickly morphs into something much more complex, with surprise twists and possible suspects coming thick and fast as the plot develops.

Bleak Harbour is a town with many undercurrents and secrets, and it’s described extremely well. The characters are flawed, not particularly likeable but they drive the plot, and as efforts to find Danny escalate the darkness at the heart of the town begins to surface. The only redeeming feature is Carey’s desire to protect her son. Suspicions are raised and actions questioned but each trail seems to lead to a dead end. A bit like my guesses about the perpetrator. The reveal is something I would never have guessed. Perhaps it was a little farfetched but nevertheless I enjoyed the read very much.

The diverse characters are well depicted, especially Danny. I don’t know much about the effects of autism but Danny is as individual as any of them, with his own distinct personality and doesn’t seem to be just defined by his condition.

Bryan Gruley is a new to me author but now I’m looking forward to catching up with previous books and reading the Starvation Lake trilogy.

A labyrinthine journey of deceit, double crosses and secret agendas. And oh.. the treachery
MurderinCommon.com

If you received a dollar for everytime someone said "X business is a license to print money" you'd have the first instance of that statement being true.

On the day before the Dragonfly Festival in Bleak Harbor, Danny Peters goes missing. Pete Peters, his stepdad, is having a quick beer after work at his medicinal marijuana shop before he and Danny go fishing when he receives a strange text message. Carey Peters is halfway through her long commute, thinking of her work problems, when she receives the message. At first, they aren't sure if Danny has run off again or if something more sinister has happened until they receive the photo. But which of their secrets has gotten Danny in trouble?

From the very start, we see that this mystery will be built upon the layers of secrets Danny's parents have been keeping. The twists and turns this gives us are tightly woven together. Pete and Carey feel like painfully human characters stumbling through life and now stumbling through the disappearance of their son. Danny is a refreshing and interesting portrayal of someone with autism, steering clear of the usual cliches and errors.

But I really did find it hard to engage with this novel. I liked Danny, but Pete and Carey weren't particularly interesting or charismatic. It is hard to follow along with their trials and tribulations when you just want to slap them and tell them to talk to one another. As a result, it was hard to give this more than three stars despite how well the mystery was structured and the book was written.

Carey Bleak Peters should be the Princess of Bleak Harbor, Michigan. The City, after all, was founded by her family during the boon of the steel industry—and made them rich, wealth that continued beyond the closing of the steel and timber mills and shipping in the harbor as Bleak Harbor transformed into a summer vacation destination for the wealthy. But Carey’s mother, Serenity Bleak, sole heir of the fortune estimated to be worth several hundred million dollars, has other plans. And they don’t include Carey, her autistic son Danny, or her brother Jonah, the mayor of Bleak Harbor. When Danny is kidnapped and held for an ever increasing multi-million-dollar ransom, there is no shortage of suspects with strong motives: Danny’s biological father, an ex-con with a violent history; his step-father, a struggling medical marijuana dealer with business problems of his own; his mother, looking for her share of the Bleak fortune; Carey’s boss, looking for leverage against her to protect his business. As the search for Danny advances, it seems like every lead opens a door on a new suspect, and everyone has something to hide. Even the police and FBI agents investigating the crime and looking for the missing boy have their own agendas, and finding Danny seems secondary to them.

Bryan Gruely has created in Danny a complex boy with interests that provide meaning to the book. In contemplating Danny’s near obsession with a poem by Wallace Stevens, Carey remembers:

"And he would tell her that the palm in the opening line, the one Carey mistook for a hand instead of the tree it was, 'is forever out of reach.'
She always heard his declaration as defeatist, as if Danny had given up on whatever dreams swirled in his mind. It crushed her. Now, his observation strikes her as realistic, mature, even liberating. Danny wasn’t saying people couldn’t have what they yearned for. He was saying that the yearning would never cease, no matter what was gained or gathered. It was enough to embrace the yearning, then let it go. She wishes she’d listened harder."

Danny has a similar obsession with dragonflies and is known to stand and watch them for hours, seeming to see then when others can’t. He wonders, “whether any of the people…actually know what the dragonfly is about, how its flitting beauty, wings aglint in sun, masks the bloodless killer within. Probably not.”
In a book full of secrets and masked motives, even the victim has a side that is underestimated.

Bleak Harbor is a thriller that increases the pressure with every chapter; like pealing layers of an onion it slowly exposes the complex crime--and possible complicity of each character--with every page turn.

My review, posted to Goodreads this morning (link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2431748475?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1):

I was offered an advance copy of "Bleak Harbor" in exchange for a review. I agreed on the strength of the book's description, though I did not know the author, Bryan Gruley.

"Bleak Harbor" is a tightly-plotted mystery set in a small Michigan town, and you know what they say about small towns ... there's more going on beneath their placid surfaces than anyone will ever know (I don't know Michigan and am not qualified to say whether Gruley captures some of its essence, but his descriptions have the feel of authenticity).

“If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” Gruley clearly takes Chekhov to heart, wasting not a single word on irrelevant detail. Every house, street, dock, and bar in Bleak Harbor, no matter how casually inserted into an opening chapter, is sure to come back into play later. More importantly, the ever-expanding cast of characters (just three to start with, but by the end a couple of dozen) are pistols hanging on the wall as well, with secrets, hidden motivations, and surprises in store.

As each new plot development unfolds, the mystery deepens, the list of possible culprits expands, and the suspense increases. I was pulled along by a string of surprising (because unexpected) revelations, but never once felt played. Even though the mystery is complex and multi-layered, it doesn't feel contrived. The characters' flaws make them more human. Are some details of the mystery stretches? Sure (Danny remaining undiscovered in the attic of an abandoned house despite searchers combing through it multiple times, for example), but in general the twists and turns Gruley throws at us are believable. At the end, over the course of three or four very short chapters, Gruley ties up loose ends in a very satisfactory manner.

One more thing: my advance copy is labeled an "uncorrected proof." I didn't see anything that needed correcting. No typos, no mistakes. I wish my uncorrected proofs were half as good.

I don't always say this about authors who are new to me, but now that I know Bryan Gruley, I plan to read his earlier work.