Yesterday's News

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All three reviewers at Men Reading Books have favorably reviewed Belsky’s novels. I was particularly enamored with The Kennedy Connection. And, Belsky has done it again with Yesterday’s News. This is a prepublication review, and the book will be released on May 1, 2018. I read this book in a day, could not put it down. I’m only concerned that this brief review won’t do justice to the quality of this story.

My heart sank in the two-page prologue when it was clear the story would be about a missing schoolgirl, 11-year-old Lucy Devlin. But, as the story begins, Lucy has been gone for 15 years. A newspaper reporter, Clare Carlson, had won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the story. At the time of Lucy’s disappearance, it was a story that captured the nations attention. Since then, Clare had moved on from her newspaper reporting gig and had moved up from being a TV reporter to a TV executive. But she had promised Lucy’s mother that she would never let people forget about Lucy. Lucy’s parents, Anne and Patrick had long since divorced, the marriage couldn’t survive the disappearance of their child. Patrick had moved on, to another town, remarried, and had a new family. But Anne continued to hunt for clues and to bother law enforcement about her ideas, some of which were really crazy. It seemed everyone wanted Anne to come to terms with the certain death of Lucy, but she would not, and Clare had given her a promise.

When Anne had a new lead, she contacted Clare who had to get permission from her executives to pursue the story, not on the basis of a new lead, but on the basis of the 15^th anniversary of Lucy’s still unsolved disappearance. Through the first half of the book, Belsky did character development as one would expect, but then the plot really got going. There were a series of twists that I did not see coming and the end was both excellent and realistic. Belsky provides an excellent character study of aspects of the dark side of life that we hope does not ever touch us.