Always Knew There'd Be a Mystery for This Massachusetts City -- New, from Liz Rosenberg

Worcester, Massachusetts: Drive into this bigger-than-expected urban enclave, with the second highest population of the Bay State's cities, and new buildings for the arts and commerce shine from the downtown. But the traffic patterns, the neighborhoods, the twists of roads re-made over the years and not quite up to the number of cars on them, even when it's not rush hour ... all these speak most eloquently of the years when manufacturing made up the life energy of Worcester.

In the powerful new novel from Liz Rosenberg, INDIGO HILL, time shifts dramatically backward a lifetime, after Michelle and Louisa's elderly mother dies quickly of pancreatic cancer. For one brief moment, Alma Johansson, hard-working widow of a hard-working good man, considers trying to tell her secrets to her grown daughters. But as usual, 43-year-old Louisa's brusque comment jams up the conversation, and after that, there's no time left to confide anything. Well, what could it have been anyway? Her daughters know all about Alma's life.

But when their mother's will is presented, they discover how wrong they've been. And the shocking process of allowing an unexpected beneficiary to come to their mother's house and sort through its contents spins Louisa, an outwardly bitter woman with a soft core shown only at her workplace (she's a much-valued mental health counselor), back into her own net of secrets, losses, and terrible trade-offs.

She'd known it for a long time. People disappointed you. They let you down, they went away or died. They seldom turned out the way you thought.

But not, whispered the secret voice in her head, not your mother. ...Her mother at least could be counted on; Alma Johansson was rock solid -- or so Louisa had always believed. ... No. No way, She just couldn't do it. Louisa stuck the key into the ignition, and before she knew it she had parked the Chevy in the lot behind the hardware store belonging to her oldest school friend, Flick Bergstrom.

The sight of the old familiar brick building made her breathing a little easier, the pain at the center of her chest less intense.

Flick, it turns out, bears outward scars of a fire they'd experienced as teens. Louisa's are inward. And to make sense of her own past, as well as her mother's, she'll have to open those wounds again.

A fire that changed her teen community is at the heart of what Louisa must exhume. It's a long, painful, yet achingly lovely process, something like peeling away the collapsed roof and walls to rediscover something precious and unburnt within. Rosenberg's pace is steady, relentless as time itself, as she walks Louisa toward the truths that shimmer beyond her matter-of-fact family, her compromising in love, and her community.

Is it a mystery? Hmm. The pace is deceptive; the secrets are deep and burning. I felt as though INDIGO HILL solved something vital, and something that could perhaps only exist in the layered maufacturing city of Worcester. Even when the author's Afterword reveals the "facts" beyond the story (a real fire in 1968; lives lost), there's a magical sense of revelation as well -- as if all the bok-length uncovering had created also somehow the answer to how to live with the past and how to bless it. And that may be the deepest mystery of all.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.