A teenager investigates a friend’s murder and learns much more than she bargained for. McHugh’s debut interweaves two parallel stories, set almost two decades apart. We begin with Lucy, who relates that the dismembered body of her school friend Cheri, a mentally disabled 18-year-old who had been missing a year, was found near a creek outside the remote town of Henbane, in the Missouri Ozarks. Approximately 18 years earlier, Lila, a young Iowa woman who has just aged out of foster care, is placed by an agency in a job with Crete Dane, who owns Dane’s, a restaurant/general store, and a lot of other Henbane real estate.

This item: The Weight of Blood: A Novel by Laura McHugh Hardcover $12.95 Only 1 left in stock - order soon. Sold by Doodads, Nix, and Nax and ships from Amazon. THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD. By Laura McHugh. BUY NOW FROM. McHugh’s evocation of the rugged setting and local speech patterns starkly reveals the. 'It is a long time since I have read a debut as impressive as Laura McHugh's The Weight of Blood. It is a chilling portrait of a small town in the Ozarks where.

Driver Sitecom Adsl2 Modem Router 54g Mode. Lila’s job is supposed to include room and board, but the room is a stifling one in Crete’s garage, the food is intermittent, and Crete withholds most of her pay. Back in the present, Lucy, 17, has just taken a summer job with her uncle Crete. Mostly, her duties involve waitressing at Dane’s, but when she and another teenager, Daniel, are assigned to clean out a remote trailer in the woods, the teens notice obvious signs of a struggle and something else: a necklace that Lucy had given Cheri. This discovery sends Lucy and Daniel on a quest to find Cheri’s killer.

Meanwhile, in the past, Lila, whose beauty both enthralls and disturbs Henbane’s downtrodden townsfolk, learns the real nature of her job: Crete plans to force her into prostitution. Enraged that she prefers his brother Carl, Crete rapes Lila and inflicts a festering bite, then holds Lila captive in her garage room until Carl intervenes, eventually leading to an intersection of past and present. McHugh’s evocation of the rugged setting and local speech patterns starkly reveals the menace lurking beneath Henbane’s folksy facade. However, a misguided authorial attempt to find the good in Crete only muddies the novel’s moral waters, since nothing can mitigate or redeem the evil he inflicts.

An accomplished literary thriller.

'It is a long time since I have read a debut as impressive as Laura McHugh's The Weight of Blood. It is a chilling portrait of a small town in the Ozarks where violent men are protected and young women vanish.' Joan Smith, The Sunday Times People still whisper about Lucy Dane's mother who vanished years ago from the town of Henbane, deep in the Ozark mountains. Baldur Gate Dark Alliance Ii Ps2 Iso Download there. When one of Lucy's friends is found murdered, Lucy feels haunted by the two lost women: by the mother she never knew, and the friend she couldn't protect. But her search for answers, in a place where secrets are easily concealed, leads her to a chilling discovery. And with this revelation, she must grapple with the meaning of family, the secrets we keep, and the lengths we will go to protect the ones we love.