  | Book Details Title: Purgatory Bay (Bleak Harbor) |
Book DescriptionReview “One crazy ride.” —Kirkus Reviews“A fiendish quest for revenge drives Gruley’s tense second thriller.” —Publishers Weekly“Gruley has crafted a dark, complex novel with an equally complex and often empathetic villain. Perfect reading for cold, gray days.” —Booklist“Any thriller in which the villain is motivated by the writings of Flannery O’Connor is not to be dismissed. And Purgatory Bay plugs neatly into the history of bureaucratic corruption, land schemes, dysfunctional families, and grudge matches Gruley has sketched out in previous efforts. The new novel beckons readers to come on in, even if the water’s not so fine.” —Chicago Tribune“Gruley is a fine writer who flashes real talent at bringing his picturesque settings to life. A natural storyteller, his latest grabs readers early and pulls ’em in—and offers a few twists along the way.” —The Real Book Spy“Jubilee Rathman is one of the most engrossing characters in recent memory.” —The Big Thrill“An intense and powerful read. Very much worth your time.” —Kevin’s Corner Book Reviews“An impressively original, deftly crafted, and thoroughly absorbing read from first page to last, Purgatory Bay is a compelling and highly recommended novel for community library Mystery/Suspense collections.” —Midwest Book Review“Gruley combines the instincts of a journalist with the intuition of a novelist, skillfully contrasting the timeliness of technological advancements with the time-tested provocations for murder and martyrdom. This one is hard to put down—and even harder to forget.” —Criminal Element“As always, Bryan Gruley’s characters are as complex as his plots—with no one being completely good or bad. It is the new character of Jubilee Rathman readers will find themselves drawn to—she’s multifaceted and fascinating, while never becoming a caricature.” —BOLO Books“Bryan Gruley’s Purgatory Bay is a suspenseful and complex adventure filled with fascinating characters, including a cunning and vengeful villain who made my skin crawl. An exciting read with a satisfying ending!” —T.R. Ragan, New York Times bestselling author of the Lizzy Gardiner series“Purgatory Bay is a knockout! Bryan Gruley has populated this eerie story with a cast of characters who range from menacing to heroic and together create a whirlwind of momentum that makes this one impossible to put down.” —#1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly“A gripping contemporary story of revenge, with scenes accelerating like heartbeats from the grave to its emotional, pulse-pounding conclusion.” —Andrew Gross, New York Times bestselling author“With the enigmatic skill of a guide returning to a place both mysterious and dangerous, Bryan Gruley invites readers back to the world he created in Bleak Harbor. Purgatory Bay is a complex, persecuting and captivating tale. Once again, Gruley creates a fascinatingly twisted family saga that braids the weight of guilt with the torment of grief and the glimmer of hope.” —Amber Cowie, author of Rapid Falls and Raven Lane Read more About the Author Bryan Gruley is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Bleak Harbor and the award-winning Starvation Lake trilogy of novels. He is also a lifelong journalist who is proud to have shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the staff of the Wall Street Journal for their coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Gruley lives in Chicago with his wife, Pam. You can learn more by visiting his website at www.bryangruley.com. Read more Customers Review: “What the h*ll kind of town is this? We came here for a d*mn hockey tournament, and half our family has gone missing.”Whenever I read a Bryan Gruley novel, all of which have been set in small towns in Michigan, I find myself paying less attention to the mystery and more to the characters, and the secrets they drag along with them form their pasts, and how their secrets create intriguingly complicated relationships between them. PURGATORY BAY has a good number of them, from the police chief who has a sexual history with the investigator whose girlfriend has gone missing to the mayor — and former bedmate of the missing woman — who is more concerned with collecting secrets about prominent townspeople to maintain his grip on power than he is about the missing woman. And, as always, his character game is highest when Gruley, a career journalist, pulls back the curtain on the newsroom and shows us the morally complicated, often compromised people, who make its daily sausage. Their lives are both exciting and empty at the same time, full of proximity to power and unbridgeable distance from it, and Gruley’s understanding of these people helps those passages of PURGATORY BAY hit their highest gear.Some may think that prizing character over mystery in a mystery novel is not a compliment, but I think it is. Plots, especially the “twisty” ones currently in fashion, come and go and rarely stick with readers. But good characters with deep and tangled roots tend to stay with you, and by extension make you stay with the author and return to their work. And Bryan Gruley has a gift for that; that is, on top of his ability to create intricate plots — with a genuinely shocking twist reveal at toward the end, in the case of PURGATORY BAY — and maintain crisp pacing.There is one exception to the character compliment, however: the putative villain, a young woman named Jubilee Rathman whose family was murdered by a mob associate when she was a teenager. As PURGATORY BAY opens, she’s gone from being a sympathetic victim to a creepy, emotionless cyber-villain whose whose life after the massacre has been so channeled into an incredibly elaborate, cinematic plan for revenge on everyone she deems responsible for the deaths. She’s so poured herself into her payback plan that she’s shut herself behind the walls of her heavily guarded lakeside compound and deliberately drained herself of all humanity, tending to speak as robotically as the virtual assistant she’s trained to be her surrogate. (Sample dialogue: “It is time for the righteous to be satisfied” and “The leveling of the rink will punish not just Bleak Harbor but all the delusional parents thinking their special daughters have special futures.”) And she’s so drained herself of humanity to the point that she can’t take any pleasure in any of her killings.I’m of the opinion that every crime novel should have a memorable villain, and what makes a villain memorable to me is the idea that they feel justified in doing the terrible things they do, and that sense of justification — if not completely detached from reality — should make them seem more human. But Jubilee’s not having any of that. She resists any attempt at reader empathy. And without anything for the reader to bond with, she comes across as a character as flat and cartoonish as a James Bond villain, to the point that I found myself wanting to hurry through her POV chapters so I could get back to other, more intriguingly nuanced characters.But that isn’t a dealbreaker for PURGATORY BAY. Far from it. You’ll make your adjustments to the Jubilee problem — if you find it to be a problem at all — and revel in being comfortably seated in a sturdily constructed mystery-thriller created by a writer with a watertight sense of story craft. I admire Gruley’s willingness to boldly stake out new territory with his unique blend of small-town mystery and techno-thriller, as he did in his last outing, BLEAK HARBOR, and it cannot be said that he doesn’t succeed at accomplishing precisely what he’s set out to do — create a page-turner that doesn’t skimp on subtly layered depth.
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45 reviews