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The Undercurrent

By Sarah Sawyer

Hoping to catch the eye of the boy she likes, 13-year-old Deecie Jeffries sneaks out of the house in Austin, Texas, in 1987 and is never heard from again. The case remains cold for more than 20 years, when Bee Rowan, a neighbor who was 15 at the time, returns to Austin to face up to the past — Deecie’s, and her own family’s.

“It has never occurred to Bee to count Deecie’s disappearance as the third tragedy that summer, the final stick to be pulled out of the dam that was holding the Rowan family together,” Sarah Sawyer writes in THE UNDERCURRENT (Zibby Books, 276 pp., $27.99). “But maybe, somehow, it was.”

On the surface, the book follows the well-worn fictional path along which troubled young adults return to their hometowns to look anew at mysteries from their childhoods. But this is less a criminal investigation than a layered excavation of family secrets, misconceptions and the extreme measures mothers will take to protect their children.

What really happened that fateful night, and what — if anything — did Bee’s twin brother, Gus, and his friend Leo have to do with it? Who’s covering up for whom? And why can’t any of these people speak honestly to one another?

The novel features big emotions and incorrect assumptions on the parts of nearly all the characters. Fittingly, it begins and ends with Deecie, who is full of naïve wonder and innocent longing on what turns out to be her last night alive. The final, shocking twist comes at the very end.

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Credit...TK

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