See Whores

This book is built on its title, and it earns it. See Whores is a serial-killer thriller that keeps asking who gets seen. The killer is hunting women the city has already stopped looking at, and the story refuses to let the reader follow suit. Taysia Hart is "invisible as she was murdered," and the book spends its remaining pages making her visible: a gifted singer, a girl with a plan. When Isabel confronts the press at the hospital, "Or do you only SEE WHORES?", the title becomes a charge laid against the reader as well as the cops.

Isabel is the novel's real achievement. The prologue gives her a voice nobody else could write: "The same people who put children in cages put flowers in boxes." The mother who "had no business getting pregnant," the system as an alligator, and the baby bird crying from inside its jaws all pay off in the last pages, when she stops explaining the cry and notices that now "someone responded." Dr. Stern's slow unlearning of his own diagnoses is the kind of decency that makes this dark material bearable. Chapter 12 is the high point: Isabel treating her own grief as an investigation, then Dr. Stern leaving her coat on the chair so she can pick it up herself.

The central twist, that the monster is Isabel's half-brother and her biological father, is seeded early through Maria's dream and Rosa's letter, and it lands. The book never lets it excuse him: "Two different questions... Don't let one answer the other." Rosa's death scene and the final prison visit are where the plot's promises are kept. The dedication to survivors "who have never hurt a soul" is honoured on the page.