Bad Dreams and Forgotten Pasts

Up The Creek by Alissa Grosso (2020 Glitter Pigeon Press) – Book 1 in the Culver Creek Series follows a family, each with dark secrets, and a police detective who moved to the small town in Pennsylvania to escape his own demons. A cold case murder will bind them all together.

Lance and Caitlin struggle with the challenge of their young son Adam’s terrible dreams. He wakes the house with his screams about the things he sees there. Discussions of what to do about them are a source of conflict in their marriage. Meanwhile, police detective Sage Dorian has moved to the small Pennsylvania town of Culver Creek to put some negative parts of his life behind him. There’s not a lot to do for a detective, so the department puts a nineteen-year-old unsolved murder on his desk. Being the outsider doesn’t make him popular with his department, and second guessing their work doesn’t help.

Alissa Grosso does a nice job setting up characters we can relate to in a situation that feels familiar. She writes well, and the story had enough change of direction that I didn’t see everything coming. The biggest problem I had with the story is that there are too many mysteries here. All the major characters have some secret that requires resolution. Caitlin has dreams of her own, Lance has a dark past that he has blocked out, Adam has his own issues with the terrible dreams and Sage is driven by an event in his past. The story felt like it whipsawed from one dark secret to another without pause. That kept any of them from becoming the center of the story, which became an increasing hurdle for me as I read. By three quarters of the way through the book, it became clear to me that we needed one less dark mystery. That feeling was reinforced when Grosso chose not to resolve one of them at the end of the story. It was frustrating. Either these are important enough to include through the body of the story, at which point we need some kind of resolution, or they aren’t, which means we shouldn’t be wasting time on them.

Because of that logjam, there are fascinating questions that never get explored. What is the source of the dreams that figure in the stories of two of the characters? There’s a drug addiction story line that felt like it was never fleshed out. Lance’s mystery has deep roots in family issues that impact his own family, but that storyline gets only a light pass. There’s room for more psychological depth there that goes unexplored. If she had limited the number of problems in the story, the book would have had a better focus for me. Whose story is “Up The Creek”? I’m not sure I can answer that question.Having said that, “Up The Creek” tells an interesting story, the writing is solid and if I come across the next volume in the series, I’m likely to pick it up.

This review is based on an Advance Reader’s Copy I received from the publisher and is

consistent with our Review Policy.

Rating – *** Worth A Look

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