Set against a layered Manhattan landscape, The Special Power of Restoring Lost Things explores a fractured family through the alternating perspectives of the mother, father, and brother of a young woman during the aftermath of her disappearance. A year of silent but collective anguish culminates in the fateful thirty hours after a body with a striking resemblance to hers is found, and we see her buttoned-up Upper West Side family spiral in different, dangerous directions: Her mother, Carol, nearly comatose by day, comes alive at night in a vigilante-like attempt to track down her daughter’s killer. Her brother, Ben, once the “good kid,” adopts her bad habits along with her former friends who may have been complicit in her death. And after failing to keep his family from splitting apart, her seemingly stoic father, Drew, finally allows himself to crack.
In her third novel, Courtney Elizabeth Mauk presents a nuanced character study and offers a jolting and unforgettable portrait of a family’s struggle to survive.
A superb psychological suspense thriller The Special Power of Restoring Lost Things by Courtney Elizabeth Mauk is a psychological suspense thriller about a family spiraling in dangerous ways after their daughter has gone missing. It is a spellbinding and searing portrayal of loss and grief, and the surprises that come along the way. The author explores the pain and uncertainty that the family encounters – with vignettes from the past, hope for the future, all beautifully drawn, taking the reader along to the final pages, hoping…
HITS ME HARD ON MANY LEVELS – SO CLOSE TO MY LIFE This book struck me hard and personal. I’ve worked and attended college in New York City, many years ago yet much of that city is still within me. Now, for a little over a year I’ve been grieving the loss of our adult daughter. A superbug took her in one day and we couldn’t get there before she died. Every day my wife’s and my memories go to her, as do the memories of this novel’s family.
Great, if you hate Fun or Jokes, you know, Happiness. Phew, talk about a downer. Everything about this book is joyless, hopeless. It really fits in the mood of the subject matter, but for the time frame, a year after a girl’s disappearance, I thought there could be SOME lightheartedness, but there wasn’t really anything for this book. Like zip, zero, AND zilch.