Long Bright River by Liz Moore (#18 in 2020) Mickey and Kacey are sisters. Mickey is a police officer in an opioid-addicted neighborhood of Philadelphia, and Kacey is a known addict. When Kacey goes missing amidst a string of multiple murders, Mickey risks everything to try and find her sister. For most of the beginning of this book, I thought Mickey was a dude. Much of Mickey's thought process and emotional expression seemed very masculine to me. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think it made Mickey's character much more believable as she is a police officer in a tough area and needs to present a much harder exterior than women in other, more female-dominated careers. A few of the twists were easy to figure out, but none of my suspicions were fully confirmed until the last third oft he book, making me eager to keep reading to find out if my guesses were correct. I liked the chapter lengths and breaks. Most were very short, but some were longer. I like chapter lengths that are shorter as it makes it easy for me to binge a few chapters during lunch or before my next tutoring client shows up. Something that might deter readers would be Moore's lack of quotation marks around dialogue. I, for one, really disliked Sally Rooney's dialogue technique because of the lack of punctuation, but Moore's style didn't impact my appreciation for her work in the slightest. The conversations were incredibly easy to follow and each character's "voice" is so distinct that it wasn't difficult to differentiate between who was speaking or when. There are a lot of tough topics presented in this book: the opioid crisis, addition, babies born to drug-addicted mothers, prostitution, and broken families. All of these elements make the story a heavy read, but the plot was so engaging that I couldn't help flying through it in a matter of a couple of days. 4.5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
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