LEAVE NO TRACE

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Fiction

Secrets in the wilderness

LEAVE NO TRACE
By Mindy Mejia
337 pp. Atria

People disappear. Some, like the Maine hermit of North Pond, Christopher Knight, drive away from society, park their car, and vanish into the woods for 20-plus years. Others, like the Lykov family of Russia, flee persecution and live off their wits and the few seeds they took with them into the Siberian wilds. Or, like Ho Van Thanh with his son, they flee the violence of combat and aren't discovered until years after a war has ended. 

Author Mindy Mejia pivots off these and other cases of the disappeared in her page-turner of a novel, Leave No Trace, told in first-person by her flawed hero, Maya Stark.

The story begins at the Congdon Psychiatric Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, where Maya is an assistant speech therapist. A remarkable feat considering she was once a patient there, back in the days after her mother left, her abandonment issues, the acting out, and her incarceration for a mysterious crime she committed. She still has a bit of the rebel in her. As Mejia describes her, "I was the maroon-haired punk girl who ran her German shepherd along the lake, making all the tourists snatch their kids out of harm's way."  Maya loves her job, but she does not let people close. 

One day, an unidentified young man is arrested, found scouring the goods of an outdoor store and arrested for attempted burglary. He is violent and uncommunicative. After his court arraignment, the judge orders him sent to Congdon for treatment. 

He becomes quite a news sensation once identified. Along with his father, it seems Lucas Blackthorn has been missing for ten years in the vast latticework of interconnected lakes and wilderness known as the Boundary Waters. Lucas's story soon goes viral. The press calls him "the boy who came back from the dead." Facebook pages and Twitter feeds are all abuzz, and his new fans protest outside the hospital to free the Lost Boy.

No boy anymore, the 19-year-old Lucas refuses all therapist's efforts but seems to have an affinity for Maya. In one of their sessions, when he finally does speak, he says, I think I know you.  But why and how? He's been in the wilderness for most of Maya's life. Maya has no recollection of him. 

The rest of the book is an answer to that intricate puzzle. Leave No Trace is part thriller, with  scenes that kept me flipping pages well past my bedtime, and part romance, or perhaps just a bonding of two simpatico souls.

Overlaid over the storyline is the Boundary Waters and its wilderness, its severe weather, and the secrets it holds. Some of the descriptions of the land and waters of Minnesota are stunning, and Mejia's perception of people and their motives is profound. She examines loyalty, family relationships, our secrets, and how deep pain of the past can come back to haunt us. The things parents can unwittingly do to their children can cut deep. Whether or not children survive this is something else parents might unconsciously instill in them. 

A lot of research went into this book. Mejia's knowledge of psych hospitals, their security systems, layouts, and staff routines was substantial and entirely believable. Her grasp of the lake region of Minnesota is just plain grand. 

There are a few leaps of faith and certain scenes that require an extra effort in the suspension of disbelief on the reader's part, but the writing is so good, and the story so mysterious, that Mejia kept me turning pages for the answers to all the riddles. Readers who enjoyed books by Gillian Flynn or Tana French should enjoy this one.