What She Saw by Mary Burton ~ A Review

by Susan Roberts

An investigative reporter returns to the scene of a decades-old crime to put her own unsettled past to rest in this chilling suspense novel 

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site.  A free book was provided for an honest review.

November 2025; Montlake; 978-1662516047
audio, ebook, print (351 pages); psychological thriller

Sloane Grayson is a cold case reporter who is in Virginia to solve a 30-year mystery.  Someone has been convicted of killing 4 girls at the Mountain Music Festival and is close to getting paroled, but he was convicted with no bodies ever being found.  Sloane's goal is to find the bodies of those four girls who have been missing for 30 years, and it's personal because one of them is her mother, who died when she was an infant.

This well-written novel is a dual timeline, with one timeline being Sloane's current quest to find the bodies and the other timeline during the music festival, where the reader gets to meet the four young women who disappeared.  During the 30-year-old timeline, Sheriff Taggart is the person who worked to solve the crime.  His dogged pursuit of a killer helped to convict the music promoter.  Losing four girls in the small town was a real blow to the town, and the Sheriff ended up committing suicide because of his inability to find the bodies and bring closure to the crime. 

In the current timeline, the main character is Sloane -- she appears to be kind of heartless, but she is tenacious when it comes to solving crimes.  She maybe does a few things that might be against the law - like breaking into houses - but she gets people to talk and closely follows the clues to try to solve the crime, even if it puts her life in danger.  She's one tough person with no family ties and pretty much a vagabond life who spends her time solving cases.  When she first arrives in Dawson, Virginia, the townspeople are reluctant to talk to her and bring up collective memories from the past.  Once she finds someone who will talk to her, she begins to build her case.  This time, she is getting some help -- unwanted help in her opinion -- from a PI who had investigated this case in the past.  Will Sloane be able to solve this cold case and find the bodies of the four missing girls or will her pursuit of the truth cause her to glose her own life?

This was a real page turner with lots of twists and turns.  I thought several times that I knew who the killer was, but I was wrong every time, and the ending came as a complete shock to me.  Once I went back and reviewed the clues, it all made sense and was a perfect ending to this mystery.

If you want a book with well-written characters that you won't be able to put down -- this is the book for you!

Buy What She Saw at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

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