A New Crime Novel Plumbs the Depths of Addiction and Parenthood

Liz Moore’s latest accomplishment, Long Bright River, begins with a list. Though it’s never made explicit what, exactly, it’s a list of, it is nevertheless clear: this is a catalog of the dead. It’s a powerful way to begin an exquisite novel that dug its fingers into my heart and has refused to let go.

Its first-person narrator, Mickey Fitzpatrick, is a beat cop in Philadelphia’s drug-ravaged Kensington neighborhood. She’s just been assigned a new partner she’s not sure about—he’s self-obsessed and judgmental of many of the people in their district they’re supposed to police and protect—when two things occur that will shake Mickey from her quiet, staid existence forever: a series of murders on low-income women strikes her precinct, and her younger sister Kacey, a sex worker and opioid addict, goes missing. The rest of the novel jumps back and forth between Mickey’s growing obsession related to the murders and her sister’s disappearance, a fixation that threatens to uproot the stability of Mickey and her toddler son’s life, and her adolescence being raised with her sister by their grandmother after their parents die from addiction.

A gathering in a church: tiny, subdued. Gee sinking down in the pew. Gee grabbing Kacey’s arm to stop her making noise. Our father, on the other side of us, useless. Silent. A…