The Book:
Red River Road by Anna Downes
Published August 27, 2024 by Minotaur Books
Date read: August 6, 2024
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Red River Road spoilers can be found below, but they’re hidden under a spoiler tag so you’re safe to keep scrolling if you’d just like to read my review.
The Characters:
Katy
Beth (gave the name Lily to Katy)
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
Katy Sweeney is looking for her sister. A year earlier, just three weeks into a solo vanlife trip, her free-spirited younger sister, Phoebe, vanished without a trace on the remote, achingly beautiful coastal highway in Western Australia. With no witnesses, no leads, and no DNA evidence, the case has gone cold. But Katy refuses to give up on her.
Using Phoebe’s social media accounts as a map, Katy retraces her sister’s steps, searching for any clues the police may have missed. Was Phoebe being followed? Who had she met along the way, and how dangerous were they?
And then Katy’s path collides with that of Beth, who is on the run from her own dark past. Katy realizes that Beth might be her best—and only—chance of finding the truth, and the two women form an uneasy alliance to find out what really happened to Phoebe in this wild, beautiful, and perilous place.
Anna Downes takes us on a twist-filled journey into the dark side of solo female travel, in this gripping novel that explores what drives us to keep searching for those we have lost, the family bonds that can make or break us, and the deception of memory.
Red River Road Spoilers
The Reveal:
Katy WAS Phoebe, in some sort of fugue state where she turned into her imaginary friend and was searching for herself, not her sister. She somehow was following her own previous steps.
Katy and Beth tracked “Phoebe” to Lucas’s hometown. Beth had seen “Phoebe’s” Instagram messages and knew Lucas had something to do with her disappearance. She went to his house herself and looked around, and found the stash of all the things they had stolen together (they were grifters who stole from backpackers to make their living, until he turned abusive and Beth escaped). Beth doesn’t realize it, but she walks through a room where Lucas and his father had presumably been keeping women captive. She realizes that his father was the one he was mailing the stuff to.
The reader learns through Wyatt’s POV that the “friend” he made online was Phoebe. He invited her over (posing as Lucas on Instagram), but when she visited he didn’t know what to do so ran and hid.
The camera that Wyatt set up to capture what he thought were ghosts recorded what really happened to Phoebe. Wyatt and Lucas’s father, Rory, came home from the bar and thought Phoebe was his wife Nova, who had left the family years before. He embraced her and cried on her, but then flew into a rage, smashing her head and beating her enough to kill her.
It came out later that Rory was a serial killer. He had killed Nova as well as at least one of the other missing vanlifers we hear about in the book, and buried them in the area that “Phoebe” was “telling” Katy to visit.
The Ending:
After Rory and Lucas caught Beth going through their garage, they chased them to the gravesite. A struggle ensued, and Katy killed Lucas and both girls escaped.
Katy/Phoebe came to while she was in the hospital. She now knew she was Phoebe, and had no recollection of being “Katy”. Beth came and explained what had happened as far as she knew, and a letter from Wyatt explained the rest.
The book ends with Phoebe, Beth, and Wyatt spreading Wyatt’s mom’s ashes a year later. They’ve stayed friends online since the incident.
I hope these Red River Road spoilers were helpful.
The Review:
This book was so delightfully bizarre.
The vanlife setting in Western Australia made for the perfect backdrop to this story, and certainly sparked some wanderlust for me.
I liked both protagonists–Katy, who was searching for her sister Phoebe, and Beth, who was on the run from an abusive ex. Although I wasn’t sure who I could trust, I found both of their perspectives compelling.
The reveal was one I didn’t see coming, and the conclusion was very satisfying. This has been my favorite Anna Downes book so far, and it is definitely one I will recommend.
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