Waiting for the Night Song

In Dalton’s stirring debut, an entomologist follows the path of the pine beetle from the Rockies to her New Hampshire hometown where the beetles are destroying the trees, leaving them ripe for forest fires. Cadie Kessler is confident she can wake up others in academia to the imminent devastation from the beetles’ new migration patterns due to climate change. Cadie’s research is interrupted when she receives a text from her estranged childhood friend, Daniela Garcia, warning her the brush clearing launched by Cadie led to the discovery of a dead body that had been buried in the woods 27 years earlier, an unsolved case Cadie and Daniela secretly know a few things about. Dalton slowly teases out the details of who did the killing, who was killed, and why the children helped cover it up in flashbacks involving the girls’ childhood friendship with Garrett Tierney, now deputy police chief, and Daniela’s undocumented Salvadoran parents, who harbor a secret that puts their entire family at risk. While the withholding of information occasionally frustrates, Dalton does a good job describing the danger and intrigue from the children’s point of view. Contemporary ecological and immigration issues compound the well-paced mystery, making for a taut novel that builds suspense to the very end. (Jan.)