The Space Between Trees

by Katie Williams

A murder mystery propels the plot of this novel, but the assured writing and the psychologically penetrating portrait of the two main characters play equally strong parts in this page-turner of a tale. Each Sunday morning, 16-year-old narrator Evie times her morning paper delivery so that she lays down the last paper at just about the time Jonah Luks pulls up in his pick-up truck. His job is to collect dead animals from the Hokepe Woods. “He is assembled so correctly,” Evie thinks. She stores up the details of their encounters so she can report back to what she calls “the Whisperers” at school on Monday. Evie does not consider the Whisperers friends, “but in the cafeteria, I’ve got to sit somewhere.” That Sunday morning, however, something else takes precedence: Jonah finds a dead human body in the Hokepe Woods. Evie learns that her classmate and childhood friend Elizabeth “Zabet” McCabe was murdered.

Williams perceptively captures the swirl of conflicting thoughts and actions that accompany such a violent event in the midst of this quiet, affluent neighborhood. Evie, as a “renter” and outsider, finds herself drawn to Hadley Smith, Zabet’s best friend and leader of the “so-called bad girls” at Chippewa High. Evie discovers that Hadley doesn’t think of her bad-girl crowd as friends either (“They suck,” she whispers to Evie). The author demonstrates how this unlikely pair is drawn together by their grief and loneliness. Just a few days past the funeral, Evie notes as she walks the hallways at school, “Already people are letting Zabet’s death fade like the facts from last week’s test.” Hadley entices Evie to join her on the edge. They attend a party with college boys they don’t know; Hadley emerges from the smokers’ field off campus with mysterious bruises and scratches. She convinces Evie to begin a list of suspects for Zabet’s murder, suggesting they take matters into their own hands. Hadley is as frightening as she is magnetic, but Evie is desperate to keep this first-time best friend, and Evie’s mix of naiveté and intelligence make Hadley’s grip on her all the more believable. In the end, solving the mystery takes a back seat to handling Hadley, who becomes as terrifying to Evie as the threat of any murderer at large. Gripping.