Book Review: Christmas Presents by Lisa Unger

Madeline Martin has worked hard to build a good life for herself in her small rural town. As owner of The Next Chapter Bookstore, she’s capitalized on social media to help keep her store turning a profit. Never mind if that means little time for a social life. She has her best friend Badger and, since her dad’s stroke some months back, the virtually round the clock support of family friend Miranda. So what if they and her two high-school-aged employees are pretty much her only friends?

It’s been another long day at the store when Madeline realizes that the customer she’s helping is none other than best-selling podcaster and true crime writer, Harley Granger. Harley has come to town in order to investigate what really happened the night that Madeline’s high school boyfriend Evan Handy tried to kill her and succeeded in murdering one of her best friends instead. Two more of Madeline’s friends, Ainsley and Sam Wallace, went missing that night too. While Evan was convicted of homicide, he swears that he had nothing to do with Ainsley and Sam’s disappearance. A desperate Mrs. Wallace has asked Harley to look into the cold case, hoping his prior success with other cases will help find her the answers she’s been desperately seeking for over a decade.

While Madeline sympathizes with Mrs. Wallace, she’s still too emotionally raw from her ordeal to want to help. Harley’s own reputation for being somewhat opportunistic does little to assure her either. Even as he readily agrees to sign books at her store for his fans and answer their questions, she watches him warily, for fear he’ll rip open scars that are still healing:

There are a ton more questions, and he answers them all with ease as he signs, his scrawl fast and fluid. Vague but polite. No, he doesn’t have any theories yet. No, he doesn’t have theories about where Ainsley and Sam have gone. No, he doesn’t think the police flubbed the investigation, seizing on Evan and ignoring other possibilities. I wonder how much of what he’s saying in true. That article in New York Magazine basically portrayed him as a hack and a liar.

 

No one seems to even wonder what this line of questioning is doing to me.

Complicating matters is the fact that a young woman, a dancer at a strip club, has recently vanished too. Harley is a more than competent investigator, and he soon discerns that Lolly Morris is only the latest in a string of missing young women who all bear an uncanny resemblance to Madeline. The other women had no one looking for them after they disappeared, but Lolly’s family is expecting her home for Christmas. Could her disappearance have something to do with Sam and Ainsley’s? More pressingly, will Madeline be able to overcome her fears and trauma in order to help save another woman’s life?

Christmas Presents is being marketed as a novella, but this almost 300-page book packs in more story and characterization than many other novels with much higher page counts. Lisa Unger very deftly brings her characters to life in this twisty tale, inserting a judicious amount of red herrings while avoiding schlocky plot pitfalls. 

Perhaps the most compelling character in this cast of flawed yet sympathetic people is Lolly herself. In the hands of a lesser writer, Lolly might have been a background character at best. Unger, however, presents her as someone whose spirit and courage are inextinguishable as she fights to save herself from the hands of a serial killer so she can get home to her beloved family:

I would rather be mauled by wild beasts, hungry animals with no malice, only operating on instinct and the will to survive. That seems fair to me. There might be a kind of peace to it, a circle of life essence to my death. I am the weaker animal–no fur, no claws, no hard padded feet. I’d rather go to the wolves in the fairness and savagery of nature, than go to him–a monster, a psychopath who kills and hurts for his own pleasure or deviant need.

 

No, I won’t let him kill me, not without a fight. I will cause as much pain as I can if I have to leave the world this way.

 

Is it Christmas yet? Did I miss it? Is my mom looking for me?

It’s this balance of poignancy and ferocity that had me hooked from the beginning right to the very end of this powerful, compact novel. I can’t wait to read more from Unger, who has leapt on to my list of must-read authors with this terrific book about finding the courage both to confront the past and to fight for a better future.