A Texas map marked with three red dots like drops of blood. A serial killer who claims to have dementia. A mysterious young woman who wants answers. What could go wrong?FINALIST FOR THE ITW THRILLER AWARD • “Fast and furious . . . You’ll never see what’s coming.”—The Washington Post Years ago, her sister Rachel vanished. Now she is almost certain the man who took Rachel sits in the passenger seat … who took Rachel sits in the passenger seat beside her. He claims to have dementia and no memory of murdering girls across Texas in a string of places where he shot eerie pictures. To find the truth, she proposes a dangerous idea: a ten-day road trip with a possible serial killer to examine cold cases linked to his haunting photographs. Is he a liar or a broken old man? Is he a pathological con artist—or is she? You won’t see the final, terrifying twist spinning your way until the very last mile.
Praise for Paper Ghosts
“Paper Ghosts is a riveting summer read that shows Texas in a powerfully intimate light.” —The Austin Chronicle
“[An] artful and elegiac psychological thriller . . . riveting.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[Paper Ghosts] elevates the often tawdry genre of the serial killer novel to a work of art.”—Sunday Express (UK)
“Texas has yet again bred a major American noir writer.”—D Magazine
“[Heaberlin has] developed a distinctive literary voice, one that is on full display in Paper Ghosts.”—Houston Chronicle
“Entertainingly unnerving.”—The Dallas Morning News
“Strong characterisation, haunting images, a wonderful sense of place, and some dark comedy make this travelogue-cum-psychological thriller well worth the read.”—The Guardian
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Paper Ghosts started out with a creepy feel to it with our main character posing as a potential serial killer’s daughter in order to find out if he killed her sister years before. The back and forth between the characters pulled me in and led me to think I had a riveting psychological thriller to sink my teeth into. Is Carl a serial killer? Does he really suffer from dementia or is he just a great actor hiding behind a facade? Did he kill this young woman’s sister or is she on the wrong trail? All of these questions should’ve kept the suspense level high, but less than a hundred pages in, things become more about our main characters inner musings, and there are a lot of those. Considering the amount of time spent inside this woman’s head, I was surprised that we don’t learn her real name or what she does in her real life until the end. What I did learn was that she walked into a situation with a much too high opinion of herself and her ability to handle a man with dementia, let alone the possibility of him being a serial killer. We’re told a lot about her “trainer” and how much time she’s put in to learning to protect herself from Carl should she need to. The problem is that she really didn’t know as much as she thought. I will admit that Carl does play some psychological games with our narrator, and those had the potential to be spine-tingling had our oh so prepared main character not been so completely unprepared for handling them. We do get answers to the many questions posed in this story, but too many were a bit too predictable and I never quite warmed up to the main character. I do prefer my mysteries and thrillers to be more edge of your seat, what’s gonna happen next type stories and I didn’t find that here, so quite possibly, this one just wasn’t for me.
Breathless storytelling at its very best.
“Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.”
“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting”
This novel was so well written and kept me up till 2 a.m just to finish. I had to know how it ended, the whole time i was reading i could not figure out where this story would take me. Adding the black and white photos and Grace’s notebook entries to the story was a nice touch, really made the story come alive for me.
Grace’s older sister, Rachel, who has been missing since Grace was 12, is presumed dead and the person most likely responsible is Carl Feldman, a well known photographer, who is diagnosed with dementia. He is later acquitted on a murder of another young women and put into an assisted-living facility. Obsessing for years over what happened to her sister she one day seeks out Carl and claims to be his daughter. In hopes to jog his memory she wants to take him on a road trip to various stopping points where women have vanished. Those same stopping points are also in photographs he has taken. Believing he has killed these various women who have gone missing in Texas she hopes to prove he is in fact the killer and hopefully get justice for her sister. Carl of course has no memory of these killings and is skeptical that she really is his daughter but agrees to this road trip but she has to meet some of his conditions first. She of course agrees, she has been waiting/preparing/training for this day. As the trip progresses, she sees moments of lucidity and how he’s keen to detail. Which leads you to ask Does he even have dementia? Could he actually murder all these women?
Will this game Grace is playing actually lead her to answers or will she be next in this list of missing women?
I cant stress enough how great this book is. The author did a great job of keeping you intrigued, giving you small clues to whats going on without actually giving away anything, and bringing the story alive in each page.
Towards the end it stopped being about whether or not Carl was a serial killer and became about the relationship he and Grace had formed, as messed up and crazy as that is.
Loved this book….could not put it down!
Dementia, a photographer, murders…do they all point to and describe Carl? Is Grace wrong about still thinking that Carl murdered her sister and other women even though he was acquitted of murder?
Grace has been looking for her sister and the person who took her and killed her since she disappeared on her way to her babysitting job.
Grace believes Carl took her sister, and she had a plan on how to trap Carl into confessing and leading her to where her sister is by taking Carl on a ten-day trip across Texas trying to jolt his memory.
Carl is smarter than Grace had anticipated, and her job is more difficult than she expected. Grace also seemed a bit disorganized for all the research and planning she did.
Carl was frightening simply because he didn’t seem stable, but did he act the way he did and treat Grace the way he did because he really did have dementia or was he two steps ahead of her for some other reason?
I would have been afraid to be alone with Carl had I been Grace.
Not knowing what to expect next would have had me taking Carl back immediately or not even attempting this trip in the first place. 🙂
PAPER GHOSTS is very well written, a bit evasive, and chilling. Ms. Heaberlin weaves an absorbing tale with intriguing characters. Her detailed writing is marvelous.
If you think you would enjoy a stressful, not sure why Grace is doing what she is doing “ride,” you won’t be disappointed in the twists and turns and situations that come up.
PAPER GHOSTS is my first book by Ms. Heaberlin, but she definitely knows how to pull you along and keep the suspense going. Dementia was also addressed.
ENJOY if you read this book. 4/5
This book was given to me free of charge and without compensation by the publisher in return for an honest review.
Now, years later, Grace has found Carl in a halfway house. He is a renowned photographer and her main suspect. He also has dementia, or does he? She believes that Carl killed her sister all those years ago. Now, to enact her plan…
Posing as his daughter, Grace takes him on a trek to places where he has shot some eerie photos, places where he might have killed some girls. She hopes this may help him to remember. She just has to know.
The most unforgettable aspect of this story is Heaberlin’s wonderful characters. All of them came to life on her pages. However, Grace’s excessive behaviors prior to and after her sister’s death, struck me as a little crazy. I started wondering if Grace was imagining things.
This interesting psychological mystery is told through Grace’s narration. It is insightful and interesting.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.
Suspense at it’s best with a twist in the plot.
a little far-fetched
Interesting book. Would have like a few more answers but good
Read it in about 24 hours because I had to keep going back to see what happened next.
I couldn’t decide if I liked this book or not but I had to see what would happen next! I did give it a better than average rating because I had to see how it ended. I did like the ending because she did get her answer, but would have liked more answers about the “suspect”. All in all, glad I read it.
Thrilling, twisted and unpredictable! An adrenaline rush from the first page to the last. Quirky characters and a tight, nail-biting plot. I did not want to out this book down!
#PaperGhosts #NetGalley
*I received a complimentary ARC of this book from NetGalley & Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine in order to read and provide a voluntary, unbiased and honest review, should I choose to do so.
Twists and turns and true suspense!
At first, the book drew me in by its conceit: two antagonists on a road trip. The main character’s search for the killer of her sister, and the injustice of the man tried for murder declared mentally ill. His incoherence, with flashes of seeming insight, kept me guessing. AND THEN! The incredible road trip, to get this man to confess to his murder of three other girls. The cleverness of our protagonist, who trained so that she could go on this mission. The cleverness of this decrepit man, whose wiliness in assessing “conditions” to the road trip and in evading her quest for Justice at every turn. The crazy escapades, the dog, the cat, the photographs…. the constant, heart-pounding terror…. And I was so annoyed by her constant bungling, and then shocked by his ensuing craftiness in pulling together seemingly random events…. the ending is shocking, indeed. Perhaps satisfying?