There is a truism in risk work that the event is never the expensive part. The event is one afternoon, one line in an incident log, one number you can actually write down. What costs you is the run-off; the decades afterwards, when the loss keeps quietly accruing interest in places nobody thought to monitor. Jami Worthington’s The Valley is a novel that understands this in its bones, and it is the reason the book stayed with me longer than its genre label suggested it would.
It opens the way these stories always open: with a fresh start that nobody in the family actually wanted. Michael and Lisa move their two daughters to a new city, and the move lands on each of them differently. Zoe, the elder, has been made to give up her friends and her school, and she does what a fifteen-year-old does with that grief – she takes it upstairs, shuts the door, and pours it into an online messenger where somebody is finally listening. Ashley, the younger, is despatched to summer camp for two months and is therefore, mercifully and unbearably, elsewhere. Lisa finds a new set of friends and discovers that the party does not ask her to be anybody’s mother. Michael, as ever, is at work.
Read that paragraph as a control environment and it makes you want to lie down. Four people, one house, and not a single overlapping line of sight. The father is absent by habit, the mother by choice, the sibling by logistics. Zoe’s only channel of contact with the outside world is the one channel nobody in the household is looking at. There is a killer in that city who finds girls in chatrooms, earns their trust patiently, and then asks them to meet him somewhere quiet and Worthington does not need to make him clever, because the family has already done the work for him. Zoe becomes his victim. The family, which had been failing slowly, now fails all at once.
Then the novel does the thing I did not expect and rather admired. It jumps twenty-five years.
We land beside Ashley in middle age, still assembling a life out of the wreckage of her sister’s murder and, later, her mother’s death, and doing it with the particular competence of someone who has had a great deal of practice at appearing fine. And into that hard-won equilibrium arrives a new disclosure: a twenty-four-year-old half-sister, Madison. An undisclosed liability, appearing on the balance sheet a quarter of a century after the books were supposedly closed. Ashley has to decide what to do with her, and with what her existence implies about the parents she has spent her whole adult life carefully not thinking about.
This is where Worthington is genuinely good. The psychology of the survivor is written with real attention, not the operatic grief that thrillers usually hand their bereaved, but the low, administrative version, the kind that shows up as flinching from ordinary questions and being unable to accept good news without checking it for a catch. Ashley is not a woman haunted so much as a woman permanently over-provisioned against a loss that has already happened. The prose is spare and the pacing is confident; I read it faster than I meant to, and not because I needed to know who did it.
Which brings me to the ledger’s other side. The murder sits at the heart of this book and the book keeps walking away from it. The killer’s identity is disclosed near the end, but it arrives more as an administrative closure than a revelation, and the murders themselves, the pattern, the pursuit, the man, are left largely unexamined. I do not think a novel is obliged to be the thriller its cover promises. I do think that if you build your architecture on a serial predator, you owe him more weight than this. His thinness makes Zoe’s death feel less like a crime and more like weather.
And there are too many pages given to Lisa. Her drinking, her parties, her narcotics: the point is made early and made well, and then made again. Every chapter spent watching her come apart is a chapter not spent on the two things the book is best at – Ashley’s interior weather, and the strange, wary negotiation with Madison. Reallocate a hundred pages and this is a much stronger novel.
Still. It held me, it moved, and it took the loneliness of a girl in a bedroom seriously enough to build a whole book on the consequences. Read it for the survivor, not the killer.
My rating: 3.8/5
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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