15 June 2021.
ISBN: 978-1-78931817-3 (PB)
Cambry Nguyen left home young. She was a wild child who hurtled
outrageously through life, leaving a series of unsuitable boyfriends strewn in
her wake. When she plunges from Hairpin Bridge in Montana, the official
verdict is suicide, and given her history who is going to question that?
Only one person - her twin sister, Lena. Lena, a studious, solitary, and
vulnerable figure, writes book, film, and video game reviews. As it turns
out she also has the tenacity of a terrier and is determined to discover what
really happened and why Cambry’s broken body ended up in the chasm 200 feet
below the crossing.
Lena coolly arranges to meet highway patrol man, Corporal Raymond Raycevic,
ostensibly the last person to see Cambry alive. Raycevic agrees to take
Lena to the spot where he reportedly saw her sister leap to her doom, but he’s
hiding something, and Lena begins to push for answers. It soon becomes
clear that the unlikely sleuth will need to summon up reserves of strength and
courage previously untapped if she is to avoid her twin’s gruesome fate.
Malign forces ooze through the text from the very beginning of the story.
A third person narrator reveals present and past events through the
perspectives of each twin. Interspersed between these two points of view
are Lena’s blog posts, first-person commentaries of the period that led up to
her accompanying Raycevic to the spot from which Cambry jumped. This
fractures time within the narrative and combines with the remote setting and
dizzy height of the bridge to create a sense of dislocation, disbelief and
confusion within both Lena and the reader. Having led us to the top of
the bridge, the author unleashes a literary rollercoaster as the plot screams
along through a series of breathless free-falls punctuated by brief periods of
respite before the next unexpected descent into terror. Early on a
literal inferno begins to surround the protagonists in the form of the
Briggs-Daniel wildfire. As the fire moves ever closer to the protagonists it
becomes a metaphor that reflects the peril that threatens to consume Lena and
her sister’s killer.
Hairpin Bridge is a spell-binding and exciting crime novel. It
twists, turns, and confounds the reader. One minute I wondered why on
earth Lena didn’t just get in her car and flee to safety, the next I found
myself cheering as she edged a little closer to avenging her twin’s
slaughter. Chilling, disturbing and sometimes horrifying, Hairpin
Bridge is a book that I could not put down. An outstanding read.
------
Reviewer: Dot
Marshall-Gent
Taylor Adams directed the
acclaimed short film And I Feel Fine in 2008 and graduated Eastern
Washington University with the Excellence in Screenwriting Award and the
prestigious Edmund G. Yarwood Award. His directorial work has screened at the
Seattle True Independent Film Festival and his writing has been featured on
KAYU-TVs Fox Life blog. He has worked in the film/television industry for
several years and lives in Washington state. Eyeshot was
Adams' debut novel, published by Joffe Books.
Dot Marshall-Gent worked
in the emergency services for twenty years first as a police officer, then as a
paramedic and finally as a fire control officer before graduating from King’s
College, London as a teacher of English in her mid-forties. She completed
a M.A. in Special and Inclusive Education at the Institute of Education, London
and now teaches part-time and writes mainly about educational issues. Dot
sings jazz and country music and plays guitar, banjo and piano as well as being
addicted to reading mystery and crime fiction.
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