One of many books that made me scratch my head in wonder after reading the blurbs and a couple reviews for it. I read it because it takes place in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, my home city, an area that has gotten some national attention because of its being an epicenter of the opioid epidemic, though far less attention since the pandemic.
I kept wondering if the prose was bad by design to make the narrator's voice more authentic—she's a police officer in her early thirties, smart but unschooled. You know how cops can be: At that point, the suspect then proceeded to attempt entry through a door that had been secured with a lock, instead of The suspect tried to break down the locked door.
It's one of those books with many chapters that would barely fill a page if you took out the huge spaces between some of the paragraphs. Tighten up the spacing, and [b:Long Bright River|43834909|Long Bright River|Liz Moore|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1555616163l/43834909.SY75.jpg|61430159] would've been at least a third shorter and saved a lot of trees. It seems that a lot of writers have in mind an audience that doesn't want to go longer than two minutes without touching their cell phone. Too bad for readers like me, who are happy to get lost in more sustained thought.