Cemetery Girl

I went into Cemetery Girl thinking this book would be a traditional crime novel and I was excited to dive in and try and attempt to figure out the culprit myself before the last page. However, what I found while reading Cemetery Girl, author David Bell was not writing a traditional or predictable story.

Caitlin disappeared when she was twelve years old. Her parents searched for her for years, trying to find out what happened to their daughter. Four years later, just as Caitlin's mom has just about given up hope and has even put up a headstone for Caitlin at the local cemetery, Caitlin comes back into their lives. Although she appears disheveled and somewhat underweight from what they can tell, she also seems to be perfectly healthy, other than the fact that she refuses to talk about where she's been for the last four years or what happened to her.

As I tried to figure out who was responsible for taking Caitlin, I looked at all the typical suspects in stories like this one. I followed the father for a while, but he never seemed too suspicious to me. It was actually the mother that I suspected more over him. She was quicker to let Caitlin go and she didn't seem to have a big interest in trying to get Caitlin to say what happened to her while she was gone. When Buster came into the story, I knew he had to have had some involvement somehow, so it did not come as a shock when I learned that he played a part.

The police continue to work on Caitlin's case and eventually arrest a man they believe to be responsible. Caitlin's father presses harder on his daughter, trying to get some information out of her about the past four years of her life, and Caitlin finally divulges that she is in love with the man who took her. While this is definitely not the typical way for a story to go, I still didn't get a very strong twist factor out of it. I kept reading and expecting more of a twist in the ending but as it turned out, Caitlin continued to believe that she was in love with the man who kidnapped her and she claimed that she would just wait for him until he got out of jail, which everyone seemed to be just fine with.

Although I wanted more for Caitlin in the end, I still enjoyed the story and I was glad at least that she was back safe with her parents at least for the duration that her captor was in prison. The premise of the this story is very intriguing and I enjoyed the read despite my conflicting opinions about the ending.