The Boy
By Tami Hoag
It’s a hot, humid night in Bayou Breaux, Louisiana. Detective Nick Fourcade has been called to a rundown shack outside of town, where seven-year old KJ lived with his mother, Genevieve.
KJ went to bed wearing Spiderman pyjamas and cuddling his new kitten, but sometime in the night he was brutally stabbed to death. Genevieve managed to escape and banged on a neighbour’s door for help. She’s now in hospital, with stab wounds in her shoulder and on her hands but no clear memory of what happened, remembering only a nightmare of being attacked by a “demon.”
Nick’s married to Detective Annie Broussard. They have a five-year-old son, so the murder of a child hits them particularly close to home. And KJ’s death isn’t the only case they’re dealing with: the next day they learn that his sometime babysitter, twelve-year-old Nora, is missing. The town fears that a maniac is preying on their children, especially since the police haven’t yet solved the case of an autistic girl who was sexually assaulted some months ago.
And Nick keeps clashing with their new boss, Sheriff Kevin Dutrow, who has brought in a crony to do crime scene investigation, and who has no patience with Nick’s methods.
The heat, the small-town Louisiana setting, the Cajun culture and the superstitions held by many in this community, all combine to make this a dark and atmospheric novel. The multiple story lines initially seem unrelated but all eventually tie together, climaxing with an ending that’s both surprising and sad, yet feels right.
This is the second novel featuring Nick Fourcade and Annie Broussard. The first was A Thin Dark Line, published over twenty years ago, in 1998. I’m guessing it wasn’t planned as a series, but that Hoag more recently felt inspired to revisit the characters and the setting. In 2019 she said on Facebook that she has a title for a third book in the series: Bad Liar. Some online sources say it’ll be out in December 2020, but nothing official has been announced.
Tami Hoag — then Mikkelson — was born in Iowa in 1959 as the youngest of four children. Her family soon moved to a small town in Minnesota, where she grew up and attended school. Her father was an insurance salesman, her mother a homemaker.
At 18 she married Dan Hoag, the guy she’d been dating in high school. He was attending the University of Wisconsin, and had a year to go when they married. They agreed that she’d support him while he finished, and when he got a job it would be her turn to go to university. But his first job, as a computer programmer for IBM, was in Rochester, Minnesota, where there was no university. So Tami never got to university.
She worked a series of jobs, none of them very fulfilling or interesting. Then in an idle moment (while waiting for a tow truck) she picked up a romance novel someone had left behind, and concluded that this was something she could do.
She was right. Her first novel, a romance titled The Trouble with JJ, was published by Bantam in 1988, when she was 29. In the next few years she wrote twenty books for Bantam’s Loveswept line of romance novels. When she wanted to shift to writing suspense, her publisher at first resisted, but the change paid off. Night Sins, her first thriller, was published in 1995. It quickly became a New York Times bestseller and was made into a TV miniseries, starring Valerie Bertinelli and Harry Hamlin.
ALl her books since then have been thrillers. She’s known for writing novels that are dark and intense, combining thrilling plots with character-driven suspense. She told an interviewer in 2016, “I write really gritty books about really gritty topics and people in rough professions.” In total she’s published over 30 books, in several different series as well as standalone novels. They’ve been translated into thirty languages, with over 40 million books in print.
She has always loved horses and dogs, and is an accomplished equestrienne, specializing in dressage. Now divorced, she divides her time between homes in California and Florida.
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