Coyote

Like a modern-day Poe, Winnette (Fondly) has fashioned a narrator whose pull on the reader’s sympathy gradually fades as she recounts the aftermath of her daughter’s mysterious disappearance. The girl, who remains unnamed (like her parents), was put to bed one evening and simply vanished in the night. As her parents appear on various talk shows in an effort to find their daughter, her mother recounts, in small, minutely observed sections, the devastation wrought by the loss of a child. At first, the reader shares the woman’s pain as she struggles to come to grips with her loss. Slowly, however, the reader becomes aware that first impressions are not to be trusted, as the narrator begins to reveal less about her child and more about her own tenuous grasp on sanity. This novel offers a glimpse into an unhinged mind, made all the more horrifying by the narrator’s own obliviousness. Winnette’s deeply affecting story is hard to put down and even harder to forget. (Jan.)