Friday, 20 February 2026

Paper Ghosts by Julia Heaberlin

Description from Amazon:

Long ago, Carl Feldman was acquitted of murder.

Now he’s an old man, living alone with his fading memories.

His daughter has come to see him, to take him on a trip.

Only she’s not his daughter, and if she has her way, he’s not coming back . . .

This woman is sure Carl’s a murderer, and that he’s killed others - including her sister Rachel.

And she will stop at nothing to find out the truth.

 

This description really caught my eye and I wondered how on earth she would get this right.

 

So after years of putting together clues, pictures, and making plans about finding out whether Carl killed her sister, our protagonist manages to convince the woman in charge of the halfway house Carl is at to let him out for a short road trip. Carl has dementia and has lost some of the use of one of his arms. She figures that on this road trip if she takes him to places where his other possible victims may be and align them with pictures from his photography book it may stir his memory and help him to reveal what happened to her sister. What is not said but implied is that Carl is not coming back.

 

The trip starts off well but you get the feeling that Carl’s faculties are not that confused and that his arm works better than he claims it does. He asks for a list of “must haves” on the trip and these begin to look suspiciously like tools one would use to murder and then bury the body.

 

The first couple of stops yield no clues even though she seems to be picking up more about Carl, but he also seems to be one step ahead of each decision she thinks she has made in advance. The trip meanders a bit and gets a bit boring but it’s interesting to see how she tried to bring the victims’ places together and how he justified his photos each time.

The ending kinda threw me. It’s one of those that comes out at you from left field where there were no clues sprinkled throughout to support it. There are plenty of action scenes and enough places where I wondered if the plan was futile and exactly who was not coming back.

 

Overall it was a good book and well written; it was just the ending that let it down.




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