ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEARNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, PARADE, REAL SIMPLE, and BUZZFEEDAN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK“[Moore’s] careful balance of the hard-bitten with the heartfelt is what elevates Long Bright River from entertaining page-turner to a book that makes you want to call someone you love.” – The New York Times … page-turner to a book that makes you want to call someone you love.” – The New York Times Book Review
“This is police procedural and a thriller par excellence, one in which the city of Philadelphia itself is a character (think Boston and Mystic River). But it’s also a literary tale narrated by a strong woman with a richly drawn personal life – powerful and genre-defying.” – People
“A thoughtful, powerful novel by a writer who displays enormous compassion for her characters. Long Bright River is an outstanding crime novel… I absolutely loved it.”
—Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn’t be more different. Then one of them goes missing.
In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don’t speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.
Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey’s district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit–and her sister–before it’s too late.
Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters’ childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.
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Long Bright River is a remarkable, profoundly moving novel about the ties that bind and the irrevocable wounds of childhood. It’s also a riveting mystery, perfectly paced. I loved every page of it.
I’ve been hearing about this book all over the bookternet and I knew it would be right up my alley. I love books about dysfunctional families, about families that are broken and somehow find ways to heal against all odds. This one is gritty, sad and just perfect.
The story centers on Mickey, a police officer in Kensington, a tough neighborhood of Philadelphia. She’s managed to overcome her difficult upbringing to establish her career, but every day poses a challenge. She’s getting over her failed relationship with an older detective whom she started seeing when she was a teenager, raising her son, Thomas, on her own and trying to look after her estranged younger sister, Kacey, a homeless heroin addict who haunts Mickey’s district. Mickey is able to keep an eye on Kacey from the driver’s seat of her cruiser, prioritizing Kacey’s safety above all else. This moment when Mickey sees her strung out sister on the sidewalk is particularly gut wrenching.
“We looked at each other for a long time. Time, in fact, seemed to slow and then stop. What passed between us in that moment was an unbearable sadness, the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same, the crumbling to dust of all the ideas we ever had as children about the better life we’d one day make for one another.”
When Mickey realizes she hasn’t seen her sister in a few weeks, she becomes obsessed with finding out where she is, forsaking her job, friendships and family to make sure her sister is safe.
This is a moving story about addiction, loss, and the strength of family ties. I cried for Mickey and for Kacey in equal measures. Moore does a masterful job weaving their stories together and painting a not so pretty picture of addiction and how it affects everyone in its sphere.
A superlative crime novel. Set against the backdrop of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis, this is not just a gripping mystery but a thoughtful, powerful novel by a writer who displays enormous compassion for her characters. Long Bright River is an outstanding crime novel, bringing to mind the best of Dennis Lehane or David Simon. I found myself eking out the final pages because I didn’t want it to end. I absolutely loved it.
This is an excellent book. The writer weaves an intricate but utterly believable story about the toll of the opioid epidemic. However if you’re looking for a fast-paced police procedural full of detectives and crime solving, this isn’t it. What it is is a solid study of several different characters as a woman with a hard childhood searches for her missing, addicted sister while trying to stay on what she thinks of as the right path.
This is a good story made great by a talented writer.
The writing is excellent. Different. Easy. No dictionary needed. Moore’s simple language creates clever sentences, paragraphs, chapters. What I loved most about her writing and the reason I believe the story was addicting, is Moore teases readers with just enough information for them to ask, “What’s that all about, and where’s it leading?” You feel like you’ve caught a clue to what will happen, but you’re at Moore’s mercy. You have to hang on until she’s kind enough to divulge more.
Loved. Loved. Loved. Read more on who would like at my full review https://cyndiezahner.com/2021/03/17/long-bright-river-by-liz-moore/
Gorgeously told and endlessly surprising, this character-driven mystery is one I recommend everyone read. It’s profoundly moving and beautifully written, focusing on the bond of sisters, addiction, and what’s left in the wake of a shared tragedy. It’s a murder mystery, but one that is quieter, focusing more on the relationship of the sisters at its heart than on any grisly murder.
Five solid stars! This book had me captivated from page one. It starts out as a who-done-it but quickly morphs into a brutally tender story of two sisters caught in the crosshairs of opioid addiction. One part mystery, one part suspense, and one large part family drama, this novel by Liz Moore is one I’ll be recommending for a long time. Well done!
Read my review on the New York Journal of Books: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/long-bright-river-novel
I had no patience. I had to read Long Bright River NOW. I picked it up on Friday. Saturday it rained all day long and I spent it reading. I finished the novel before I turned out the light to sleep.
I had read Liz Moore’s novel The Unknown World and loved it. But my interest in this new novel was it’s setting–Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood where we lived for just under two years, leaving in 1982I was a sheltered girl from the Detroit ‘burbs. Driving down Allegheny Avenue I once quipped that I never wanted to live there. A few years later, my husband turned down an associate pastor position at a posh suburban church and asked for an inner-city position. And we found ourselves in Kensington, a few blocks from K&A.
Long Bright River centers on K&A, Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Once a thriving business center in a working-class neighborhood, but more recently the ‘Walmart’ for opioid addicts.
In the opening scene, cop Mickey and her partner Lafferty are called when a body is found. 900 overdose victims were found in Kensington the year before, and Mickey fears that her estranged sister Kacey will be the next one.
When more bodies of young women are found, Mickey becomes obsessed with finding her sister, who has been an addict since her teenage years. She risks her job, her relationship with her four-year-old son, and her life as she searches to find Kacey. It is a journey that takes her deep into the back streets off K&A and into the heart of the underworld of drugs, prostitution, and crime.
Moore’s characters are conflicted and real, the plot foreboding and dark, and the setting vividly drawn. It was like I was back.
As schoolkids, Mickey and Kacey were bused to the Academy of Music to see The Nutcracker, something we saw several times. For Mickey it was magical.
Other Philly locals appear in the novel, including the adjoining neighborhoods of Fishtown and Port Richmond.
And Olney. When we left Kensington, we moved to Fern Rock, a few blocks from downtown Olney and lived there for seven years. Our renter neighbors were sad to see us leave and said we were the nicest neighbors they ever had.
In 1982, the ‘hood was still mainly Catholic, white, and blue-collar. Ten years later, it had shifted ethnically, and all over the city, new drugs were taking over. Every now and then I would Goggle and learn more of its decline into the center of drugs and prostitution.
We left Philly in 1990 and returned to Michigan. I never forgot living in the most foreign place I had ever lived in–K&A.
In the novel, Mickey escapes to Bensalem in lower Bucks County; we had moved to Morrisville in Bucks Co. in 1974. It was a world away from Kensington. Mickey’s son misses his school friends, his dad who lives in South Philly and who Mickey is avoiding.
The novel has surprising twists, painful scenes, and yet a hopeful ending.
Moore gives the opioid crisis faces and stories and we think, these people, these good people with blasted lives–it could happen to any of us. These children, born to addicts, born with addictions, growing in poverty and without hope. How can we allow this?
Both sweeping and unbearably intimate, a riveting crime novel and a character-rich study of a city and its battered heart. And, in the way that Dennis Lehane anatomizes and explores his Boston, or Tana French her Dublin, Moore brings Philadelphia to vivid, wrenching life. Not to be missed.
Liz Moore’s Long Bright River is a riveting portrait of so many things—of grief, of sisterhood, of a neighborhood in despair. Moore makes you care about the people that society too often abandons and, in doing so, pulls off a hat trick of epic storytelling that is stigma-busting, love-rendering, and page-turning to the last word.
I got sucked in to LONG BRIGHT RIVER from the very first sentence, and in all of its 480 pages, it never dragged for a moment. Book of the Month said it’s like reading The Wire, as written by Tana French, and that’s just about the best way to describe this novel. In it, Mickey Fitzpatrick, a patrol officer with the Philadelphia Police Department, realizes that her sister, Kacey, is missing, right around the time that a string of murders plagues the city. As someone who battles drug addiction, Kacey lives on the fringes of society, and Mickey begins a desperate search to find her somewhat estranged sister, before the person killing all these women finds her first. I loved so much about this book: the complex characters with nuanced backstories, the eerie murder mystery, the way Liz Moore switches between the present and the past without losing an ounce of momentum, the richness and grit of the novel’s setting, the empathy and compassion for people whom society would write off. I could go on. But what will remain most memorable to me is the emotional journey that Mickey goes on in the wild yet tender hope of finding her sister—and the ways in which her investigation causes her to reevaluate her own priorities, truths, and values. Even though it was long, this book was such a quick read. The chapters are really short (which I always admire, even though it seems I’m incapable of writing short chapters myself) and the prose is brisk and beautiful. The characters were gut-punchingly realistic, and there were plenty of jaw-dropping twists and turns along the way. Simply put: LONG BRIGHT RIVER is a stunning mystery, crime story, and family drama, with language you’ll want to savor even as you binge the whole book in just a few sittings.
Mickey is a cop, her sister is missing and there’s a killer loose in Philadelphia. If I had to read this book I woulda DNF’d it. Way too much description of crap that doesn’t seem to matter. This book got good the last 30% but I really liked Mickey. The ending was very good.
Portrait of the many sides of addiction, family love, redemption.
I am glad I missed the hype about this book because I was able to enjoy it for the good qualities and not have any expectations.
This story is about two sisters who were orphaned at a young age and raised by their tough and poor grandmother. It’s a story of addiction, of survival, of sorrow and yes, by the end, hope.
I loved the setup: one sister is a cop, the other is a junkie, both working the same streets in a very rundown part of the city. Both are emotionally stunted because of their past trauma, and doing the best they can to survive. Meanwhile life goes on – there’s a child to raise, a serial killer to track, a missing person to find and protect.
While the ending was more about the renewal of hope and healing for the two sisters than a big mystery climax, I still savored the story and the lovely writing. It was inspiring and will stick with me, a rare thing these days.
A great book for a plane ride or when you really want a deep dive into a heart-wrenching a family drama.
Great
As someone from western Canada who watches the saturnalian extravangaza that is United States with rabid fascination, I first heard about rampant political corruption in Philadelphia in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. I paraphrase Trump when he said that everybody knows that Philadelphia is corrupt. Perhaps time will tell if Trump’s claim about the election results are correct, but in the meantime there is Liz Moore’s Long, Bright River. A raw novel about drug addiction, law enforcement and the fraught bonds that hold a family together—and apart.
The story is narrated by Mikaela—Mickey, a single mom and police officer who patrols the neighborhood of Kensington in Philadelphia. Kensington is slowly gentrifying but is also riddled with drug addicts and drug dealers, and all the crimes associated with the trade. It’s Mickey’s home turf, though she grew up in nearby Fishtown, and she likely won’t ever leave, so long as her drug-addicted sister, Kacey, continues to ply her trade on the street corners. They haven’t really spoken in five years which is nearly the age of her son, and one of the plot twists that arises.
Then Kacey goes missing. And there’s a strangler on the loose. (A Wikipedia article references the real case of a Kensington strangler active at the time of the novel, though the perp later apprehended and convicted is a demographic far cry from the fictionalized one.)
But while this story is part crime novel, part mystery, it is really the stories of two sisters with similar beginnings whose lives widely forked. Liz Moore on her website acknowledges the themes of nature versus nurture in the story, and no exploration of that theme can happen without hacking into family. The sisters’ family are the O’Briens—an Irish Catholic hard-livin’ tribe splintered by drugs and crime and yet still come together under one roof for Thanksgiving.
The story is told in a series of flashbacks that gradually illuminate the big story questions of what is right and what is good, the hurt inflicted on loved ones, the necessity of forgiveness and always and forever, the redemptive power of familial love.
Writerly bits: A revealing study of the unreliable narrator. Mick is the ‘good’ sister or, more to the point, she thinks she is good which means she’s self-righteous. She claims that she had the more difficult childhood because she is the only one to remember their mother and therefore is burdened with fond memories. By the end, she realizes how those memories sustained her whereas her sister had nothing. Yet, Mick honestly believes what she says. Interestingly, the more a writer holds her character to the grindstone of honesty, the more the lies or self-deceptions are revealed.
Also, it’s easier to make your narrator well-read in order to flex syntax and vocabulary.
Found myself struggling to read this one due to the long stroll through a tale of a family’s drug addiction issues. The mystery this book advertises, well… I’m still searching to find it. Its beautifully written and with the few surprises it’s worth the slow burn.
Damn good mystery and great depiction of a complicated family.
Michaela (aka Mick) and Kacey have a bond like most siblings, but theirs is strengthened by feelings of abandonment, and not from one parent…but both. Raised by their grandmother, Gee, they are often left feeling unworthy and undervalued. Knowing their mother was an addict doesn’t make things easier as Kacey herself falls victim to the cycle. Mick takes a different path and becomes a cop.
Years go by and suddenly girls on Mick’s patrol are being murdered…girls Kacey knows and is friends with. The problem Mick is having is that Kacey is missing and she can’t remember the last time she saw her working her corner. Mick fears Kacey may have fallen victim to whatever evil is stalking the dark side of the streets. As she searches for her sister, other details come to light which places her in danger. All Mick wants is to find Kacey, and make sure she’s safe. As the days go by…she isn’t confident she can.
This one took me a while to get into. It’s definitely a slow read BUT it’s one that also keeps you invested in not only the mystery of Kacey’s whereabouts but also the killings in Kensington. I really enjoyed the writing, flow and format. I also enjoyed the sisters’ relationship. Family isn’t easy sometimes and the portrayal of theirs is one I’m sure many can relate to. Definitely pick this one up if you’re looking for a mystery with a little family drama thrown in. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.