The Fate of Katherine Carr by Thomas H. Cook

From the Publisher

George Gates used to be a travel writer who specialized in places where people disappeared—Judge Crater, the Lost Colony. Then his eight-year-old son was murdered, the killer never found, and Gates gave up disappearance. Now he writes for the town paper, stories of redemptive triviality about flower festivals and local celebrities, and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son’s last day.
Enter Arlo MacBride, a retired missing-persons detective still obsessed with the unsolved case of Katherine Carr. When he gives Gates the story she left behind—about a man stalking a woman named Katherine Carr—Gates too is drawn inexorably into a search for the missing author’s brief life and uncertain fate. And as he goes deeper, he begins to suspect that her tale holds the key not only to her fate, but to his own.

Publishers Weekly

George Gates, who once toured the world as a travel writer, churns out fluff pieces for his local paper and spends his nights alone, imagining what he'd do to the person who murdered his eight-year-old son seven years before and is still at large in Cook's eerily poignant novel. When Arlo McBride, a retired missing persons detective, tells Gates about the unsolved disappearance of reclusive poet Katherine Carr 20 years earlier, Gates is intrigued. Cook (Master of the Delta) seamlessly intertwines the short story Carr left behind-about a woman also named Katherine Carr-with Gates's growing obsession with Carr's fate. When his editor suggests that Gates write a profile of Alice Barrows, an orphan girl dying of progeria (premature aging), he discovers that Alice is an avid detective fan, and together they form an unlikely partnership. Adept at merging past and present plot lines, Cook eloquently examines the often cathartic act of storytelling. Author tour. (June)

Roland Person - Library Journal

George Gates, a former travel writer whose son was murdered by an unknown assailant, now writes for a small-town New York paper, still mourning and still angry. A retired cop piques his curiosity about the unsolved disappearance of a woman 20 years ago. When a newspaper assignment sends him to 12-year-old Alice, dying of progeria, the two attempt to solve Katherine Carr's disappearance by studying an autobiographical story she left behind. Edgar Award winner Cook (Master of the Delta) has delighted readers with varying topics and characters in two dozen novels, which are often more concerned with the mystery than the perpetrator. Here he ponders the question of whether an evil man really gets away with his crime. Cook skillfully interweaves mundane, often tragic events with the unseen, even darkly fanciful side of reality. In the end, Gates is left hoping for hope in this complex story within a story within a story. Recommended.

Kirkus Reviews

The disappearance of a young writer over a decade ago is only the tip of the iceberg in this cobwebby 22nd thriller from Cook (Master of the Delta, 2008, etc.). In the days when he was a travel writer, George Gates roamed the world. But he's rarely ventured outside his hometown of Winthrop since the day his son Teddy, eight, vanished from the rainy bus stop from which his widowed father had promised to pick him up. Now something has sent Gates on a new kind of voyage. A profile he's writing for his local newspaper on Arlo McBride, who retired from Rhode Island's Department of Missing Persons years after Teddy was found dead, kindles his interest in the case of Katherine Carr, a promising poet who went missing five years after an earlier attack left her for dead and turned her into a recluse. In the most affecting sequences, Gates joins Alice Barrows, who's dying of old age at 12, to read over a cryptic tale Katherine left behind and mine it for clues to her own life. Other characters from the present and past, and from the world of Katherine's imagination, float by, the most mysterious of them Mr. Mayawati, the exiled survivor of a village massacre to whom Gates tells his story. But none of them throws much light on the fate of Katherine, or threatens to dislodge her and Gates from their troubled central roles. The climax manages to be sobering and satisfying without tying up all the loose ends of Cook's most obscure puzzler. Author tour to New York, Boston, Cape Cod, Mass.

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