“Middle children always knew how to remain unseen.
They knew how to slip below the notice of others….Middle children were tricksters.”
In Julie Doar’s The Gallagher Place, Marlowe Fisher, 36, is the middle child between two brothers, Nate and Henry, the three of them raised in a big house in the Hudson Valley, free to roam the woods at will. But the woods hold secrets.
One of them came about twenty years before, when Marlowe’s best friend Nora disappeared one night. The police never solved it, but they inferred that she might simply have run away. Marlowe always knew better, though: “If she had run away, she would have taken me with her.”
And now the woods have another secret. As Marlowe and her brothers take a walk together, they stumble upon a tent containing the body of a man, his head bashed in. Who is he? What connection does he have to the Fishers’ one-time neighbors, the Gallaghers, and their tragic deaths? Why has no one mentioned to Marlowe the threatening messages that everyone in her family seems to have been getting recently, except her? Why is Ariel, the detective down from Poughkeepsie, so sure that the clues in this case will somehow lead them to the facts of Nora’s disappearance? Why does she keep questioning Marlowe, showing her old case notes, feeding her riddles, “like a troll under a bridge”?
The answers, when they come, will throw everything Marlowe thought she knew, about family, about friendship, about her memories and identity, up in the air. The secrets are both very old and brand-new, and they keep exploding around her like firecrackers. And the biggest one is yet to come.
Because Marlowe has her secrets, too.
“I get a lot of ideas when I’m walking,” says the author, “so it’s fitting that the original idea was the walk that occurs in the first chapter. I was with my family in upstate New York, and we were taking a walk, and I just thought: What if we found a body? It’s funny, looking back, because so many other, more complex ideas came to me, but it did start with that simple premise, almost like how a game of Clue starts with a nameless body. I stuck with the vision because I loved this idea that the family sets out onto terrain they think they own and know – they think they can trust this property – and then are so dramatically shocked and betrayed by the land. As I dug into the characters, I knew they were keeping secrets, and the early writing process was about figuring out what those secrets were. I wanted to have the discovery of the body in the present timeline trigger the examination of a past mystery, and as it evolved, that past disappearance almost began to eclipse the present-day mystery. I leaned into that because I liked how the past was haunting the present.”
The book takes place during two different timelines. Was it difficult keeping track of them?
“The plot twists were not, but the names and dates – that was another matter! I have so many pieces of scrap paper filled up with calculations of various characters’ ages at various points. I also sketched several (extremely sloppy) maps in my attempt to keep track of locations and distances to make sure walking distances and times felt realistic. I think I don’t struggle as much with keeping track of plot twists because when I’m writing, the characters do things that make sense to me. This character lies because that’s who they are, that’s who they’ve always been. There’s no random event coming out of left field.”
To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Julie Doar, go here.
