Summer has fully settled in—heavy, golden, almost too warm to think straight. The kind of heat that turns hours into something slow and hazy, especially when you’re sitting by a lake where everything feels softer around the edges.
And somewhere between the sunlight dancing on the water and the distant hum of life happening without urgency, I started reading Heather.
It’s a small-town mystery, but calling it just a mystery feels too simple. This is a story about women, secrets, grief, and the ways the past keeps clawing its way back to the surface no matter how deeply it’s buried. Twin sisters. A disappearance. A cold case that refuses to stay cold. A town that feels like it’s been holding its breath for decades.
Honestly, it was the perfect summer read.
While everything around me was bright and peaceful, this book kept pulling me somewhere darker—into a world where nothing is as straightforward as it seems and every answer uncovers another wound.
And gosh, this book absolutely nailed the small-town mystery vibe.
We move between timelines and follow twin sisters whose lives were forever altered by a crime in 1991. Sabrina Riley vanished and was never seen again. Her sister Annabelle, meanwhile, was left dealing with the aftermath of choices made by the worst kind of man—a predator who preyed on vulnerable young girls and left devastation behind him. Pregnant, struggling, and forced to put her future on hold, Annabelle had to find a way to survive while caring for both her child and her family. Years later, she’s built a completely different life. A good husband, three children, a community, stability. But the past isn’t interested in staying buried.
Enter our police chief, who begins digging into Sabrina’s disappearance while simultaneously investigating a drug ring connected to overdoses among local teenagers. The deeper the investigation goes, the clearer it becomes that this town has spent years protecting the wrong people.
Small towns have the best summer aesthetics and some of the worst secrets.
Crime often goes unpunished. Powerful people get protected. Women are expected to carry impossible burdens while men create the damage and walk away from it. Heather doesn’t shy away from any of that, and I loved it for that reason.
I also found the discussions surrounding Annabelle’s pregnancy incredibly interesting. At first, women rallied around her. Strangers offered help. Support. Kindness. I was sitting there thinking, yes, this is what girlhood should look like.
Then Annabelle mentioned wanting an abortion.
And suddenly that support became judgment.
Maybe you’ll never read my blog again after this take, but I don’t care—I firmly believe that if someone knows they cannot or do not want to raise a child, abortion is a valid choice. I will never understand why women are so often encouraged to sacrifice themselves in situations where everyone knows they’ll be left carrying the consequences alone.
Women already have enough expectations placed on them. We’re expected to work, nurture, perform, carry emotional labor, hold families together, and somehow still look effortlessly perfect while doing it. Finding people who bring peace into your life instead of creating more work is hard enough.
So watching women judge other women instead of supporting them?
Lame.
I appreciated that Caitlin Mullen wasn’t afraid to touch on that complexity.
And in the end, what stayed with me most wasn’t the mystery.
It was the women.
Because when everything else fails, when institutions fail, when men fail, when communities fail—real women save other women.
Complex, atmospheric, emotional, and impossible to put down.
An easy 5 stars from me, and I’ll absolutely be reading more from this author.
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