Paper Ghosts by Julia Heaberlin
Rachel, her sister, disappeared years ago. She is now almost positive that the man who abducted Rachel is seated in the passenger seat next to her. He claims to have dementia and no recollection of killing females in Texas in a series of locations where he took unsettling photos. She suggests a risky strategy to uncover the truth: a ten-day road trip with a potential serial killer to look into cold cases connected to his eerie images. Is he a liar or a damaged senior citizen? Is she—or is he—a pathological con artist? It won’t be until the very last mile that you notice the final, scary twist whirling your way.
Paper Ghosts by Julia Heaberlin
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Her sister Rachel disappeared years ago. Now, she almost certainly recognizes the passenger sitting there as the man who abducted Rachel. In a series of locations around Texas where he took unsettling photos, he claimed to have dementia and no recollection of killing females. To get to the bottom of things, she suggests a risky plan: a ten-day road trip with a potential serial killer to look into cold cases connected to his eerie images. He’s either a broken old man or a liar. He or she is a pathological con artist. The final, scary turn that is coming your way won’t be seen by you until the very last mile.
The quick version is that a woman in her twenty-fours drives around Texas with a man she thinks is her sister’s killer. Probably more information is needed to make the story more compelling. This woman, whose identity isn’t revealed until the very end of the novel, was 12 years old when Rachel, her adored sister who was 19 at the time, vanished and was initially thought to be dead. She grew a little fixated on finding Rachel throughout the entire period, wondering what had happened to her.
She grew sure that Rachel’s disappearance was the work of a suspected but, regrettably, acquitted serial killer after noticing a connection in a photography book. She discovered this man, Carl, in a halfway home after he had resurfaced thereafter disappearing for years after his trial. The older Carl was. He was suffering from dementia and had lost some use of one of his arms. She visited him numerous times at the halfway house before persuading Carl and Mrs T, the woman in charge of it, to consent to the two of them taking a trip together. She introduced herself there as his long-lost daughter.
Prior to his passing due to dementia, he for a long-lost father and daughter. Her strategy was to jog Carl’s memory and persuade him to provide information about her sister’s abduction. She was going to accompany him to the places where three other ladies, whom she also believed he had slain, were last seen in order to carry out her plan. She used fictitious identities, IDs, and credit cards, and altered her look at each visit because she didn’t know how any of it would end. There was a chance Carl wouldn’t return to Mrs T and the halfway home.
