Our narrator, name unknown until the penultimate chapter, tells the proprietor of the halfway house that Carl is her long-lost father so she can take him on a ten-day road trip across Texas, \u201cfrom the gray beaches of Galveston to the existential desert town of Marfa and then back across the state to disappear into the Pine Curtain,\u201d visiting gruesome landmarks where women disappeared or were killed, women our narrator suspects are Carl\u2019s victims. She hopes to jar his faulty memory into revealing the location of Rachel\u2019s body, so she can be properly laid to rest.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paper Ghosts: A Novel of Suspense<\/em> is the fourth psychological thriller from award-winning Texas journalist Julia Heaberlin. Her last novel, Black-Eyed Susans<\/em> (Ballantine Books, 2015), has been optioned for film by Rod Lurie and Voltage Pictures. Accessorized with haunting black-and-white photographs, Paper Ghosts<\/em> is top-notch suspense, a dangerous game of hide-and-go-seek, masterfully crafted.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Heaberlin conjures a foreboding atmosphere of exquisite tension. Paper Ghosts<\/em> is an evenly paced, intricately plotted original conception, with plenty of twists to keep us guessing. \u201cI know what worried about,\u201d the narrator thinks. \u201cI know the laws I\u2019ve broken, the snakes I\u2019ve poked. But who does Carl think is following us?\u201d Clues are dark, thin threads in a tangled bird\u2019s nest; this is a mystery requiring your attention.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paper Ghosts<\/em> moves between the present and our narrator\u2019s anxiety-ridden childhood and her obsessive search. She\u2019s literally trained with a shadowy character she discovered on the Dark Web to overcome her many fears, both real and imagined. She would make a great recurring character or the star of a series, like Taylor Stevens\u2019s Vanessa Michael Munroe, with whom she has much in common. Given the limitations of first-person point of view, we readers know only what the narrator knows, but we don\u2019t know if she\u2019s reliable.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Heaberlin has written a literary thriller in which evocative imagery and precise details provide texture. As a thunderstorm builds, \u201c[t]he air is churning, half-hot, half-cool, cream being poured into hot coffee.\u201d \u201cPerspiration sticks like apple juice\u201d behind the narrator\u2019s knees during an afternoon thick with humidity. An old Victorian home, long shuttered, is \u201cvelvet with darkness and dust.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Macabre humor is startling, but it feels good to relieve the tension. Wily Carl has a list of conditions to be met if he\u2019s to agree to this road trip with a stranger he knows isn\u2019t his daughter, including a camera, a Whataburger, a can of WD-40 (?), a copy of Lonesome Dove<\/em>, and a shovel (!). Following a near miss with a speeding car while crossing a street, Carl tells our narrator, \u201cI\u2019m taking you back to Fort Worth. You\u2019re a goddamn ticking bomb. I was looking for a pleasant little road trip and a lot of Whataburgers.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ultimately the narrator finds herself in league with Carl, which she resists, the relationship reminding me weirdly of Paper Moon <\/em>(Paramount Pictures, 1973). Paper Ghosts<\/em> is emotional pinball, and Heaberlin is the wizard.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of DFW author Julia Heaberlin’s Paper Ghosts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[894,1219,817,830,839,843,812,841],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-book-review","tag-juliaheaberlin","tag-lone-star-review","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-mystery","tag-suspense","tag-texas-author","tag-thriller"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}