I read Where the Heart Is a lonnnnnng time ago and liked it; so when I found this while looking for some quick and mindless summer reads, I thought I'd give it a shot. It wasn't too bad for a quick, mindless read---but isn't my usual. I loved the setting of the story as I live just 90 minutes from this part of Oklahoma so it was easy to imagine it all taking place in familiar territory. I thought the solution to the mystery was sort of anticlimactic. The killer and the reason for doing so weren't all that shocking. I wondered if I was supposed to be sympathetic about the reasons...I wasn't.

I was put off by the amount of foul language in the story. Like I said---not my normal cup of tea. ( )

I picked this book up at a flea market. I'd never heard of the author or the book, but the synopsis sounded interesting, so I grabbed it. I'm glad I did. I really enjoyed this. Its not super action packed, but instead moves at a steady pace. The writing and cast of interesting and likable characters are enough to keep you flipping the pages. I'm a sucker for small town settings and this one didn't disappoint. ( )

This is the story of a grown man, living near Hollywood, California, he has a rather large and interesting vet practice. Ashe ages, he grows restless and wants to find his biological parents.

His adoptive parents gave him a lot of monetary items, but still he felt something was missing.

Learning his mother was killed when he was young, and the newspaper headlines read that the baby (him) was stolen) make it all the more challenging to dig up the truth of his early life.

Traveling back to small town Oklahoma, he finds his mother's relatives, including his grandmother. He receives his mother's diary and a few trinkets. He learns his mother had a full scholarship for college, until she became pregnant.

From her on the book plot twists and turns with good, and bad small town people.

The ending is a surprise. ( )

I would not recommend this book. The central mystery of this book is the identity of the murderer of the main character's mother. The details of this murder, and especially of the consequences for other important characters in the book, were told in cursory fashion and I felt that they were glossed over. The characters were not particularly compelling or complex. ( )

Questions about the long-unsolved murder of a young woman in a small Oklahoma town are revived when a man appears, claiming to be the baby boy who disappeared from his mother's murder scene.

Letts does a good job when she's concentrating on Mark Albright's / Nicky Jack Harjo's search for his past and for the mother he never knew, and populates her story with a colorful cast of well-drawn characters. The resolution of the mystery is less well handled, with a whirlwind seven-page denouement to a 300-page setup, all (okay, most) plot noodles tucked neatly away and an unlikely romance rushed to what feels like an obligatory happy ending.

Not a bad read, but nothing outstanding, either. ( )