REVIEW:

In the early ‘90s, I remember watching the survivors of a mass shooting at Luby’s Diner in Killeen, Texas (10/16/91) on the Oprah Winfrey Show. I was glued to the screen, because this was such an unusual occurrence.

Here we are 30 years later, and mass shootings in America are tragically so common that they barely receive first story placement on the nightly news. It seems like with each passing event, the who/what/where/when/why becomes a little blurrier.

Kim Hooper’s latest novel, No Hiding in Boise, attempts to bring one such fictional tragedy into razor-sharp focus. A man enters a Boise bar shortly before midnight, shoots five people dead, severely injures two others, and then kills himself. Hooper’s book unravels the events of that night through the first-person perspectives of three women: a survivor, an injured man’s wife, and the shooter’s mother.

No Hiding in Boise is not a thriller, but it is thrilling. It is expertly-crafted literary fiction that tackles a tough, “this again?!” subject (see above) with a captivating approach. It is a near-perfect character study. It is moving, and it is surprising. It is highly recommended by this reader.

The audiobook features a full cast of narrators, each perfectly suited to their characters. My thanks to Dreamscape Media for providing a gifted copy for review via NetGalley. No Hiding in Boise is slated for release next week on June 15th.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

When Angie is awakened by a midnight call from an officer with the Boise Police Department, she thinks there must be a misunderstanding. The officer tells her that her husband was involved in a shooting at a local bar, but how can that be possible when her husband is sleeping right next to her? Except when she turns to wake him, he isn’t there.

Tessa is the twenty-three-year-old bartender who escapes to a backroom storage closet during the shooting. When it comes to light that five people were killed, she is burdened with the question of why she survived.

Joyce wakes up to a knock at her front door, a knock she assumes is her wayward son, Jed, who must have lost his keys. It’s not Jed, though. Two police officers tell her that Jed is dead, shot at the bar. Then they deliver even worse news: “We have reason to believe your son was the shooter.”

So begins the story of three women tied together by tragic fate ― a wife trying to understand why her now-comatose husband was frequenting a bar in the middle of the night, the young woman who her husband was apparently pursuing, and a mother who is forced to confront the reality of who her son was and who she is.