Family catastrophes are Mitchard's stock-in-trade, and the latest novel from the best-selling, Oprah-anointed author of The Deep End of the Ocean (1996) is no exception. The Swans are a deeply religious Mormon family living in a remote area of Utah. Twelve-year-old Veronica, as responsible as any mother, often baby-sits her sweet little sisters while her mother works in her art studio and her father teaches English at the local high school. Engaged in a game of hide-and-seek one afternoon, Veronica emerges from the garden shed where she had been hiding to discover the dead bodies of her sisters, killed within moments of each other by a young man suffering from schizophrenia. Over the next four years, Veronica's parents operate in a haze of grief and confusion; they only start to heal when they make the momentous decision to forgive their daughters' killer, a decision that sends Veronica into an emotional tailspin. She hatches an ill-fated plan to track down the murderer who had drenched our lives in blood. There is some calculated emotional manipulation here, and some of the characters are overly idealized. Nevertheless, Mitchard tells a compelling, even suspenseful, story; skillfully crafts an authentic narrative voice, and succeeds in humanizing the adherents of a religion that still suffers from widespread negative stereotypes.

Mormon teen's sisters meet grisly deaths, resulting in a slow slog over the much-trod territory of post-traumatic stress. Mitchard ( The Breakdown Lane, 2005, etc.) is defter with melodrama that admits some farce, an element sorely lacking in this glacially paced chronicle of slaughter's aftermath. Twelve-year-old Veronica (Ronnie) Swan is playfully hiding from her sisters in a shed near the Swan family's Utah home. She emerges to carnage: Scott Early, a pharmacy student on a psychotic rampage, has murdered her sisters with her father's weeding scythe, in what the media will call the Grim Reaper slayings. The Swans are victimized again when Early's diagnosis of schizophrenia means he is incompetent to stand trial. Instead, he is committed for four years—a lenient sentence, but a convenient one, plot-wise. The author offers an interminable depiction of the depressing numbness of the Swans' days (Papa goes for long walks at night, Mama takes to her bed). Eventually the parents decide that forgiving Early is the only way the family can find release, but Ronnie refuses to participate in the therapeutic meeting with Early and his wife, Kelly. The moribund drama almost revives when Ronnie, 16, decamps for California, ostensibly to train as a paramedic and raise funds for college and medical school. Early, now medicated and released, is living with Kelly in San Diego, and Ronnie contrives to become, under assumed name and hairdo, nanny to their infant, Juliet. While saving lives as an apprentice EMT, Ronnie has vague plans to avenge her sisters' deaths or rescue adorable Juliet by kidnapping her. But Mitchard pulls back before things can get remotely nefarious. Instead, there's—you guessed it—peace and reconciliation. The Mormon aspect adds no resonance. The Swans might as well be Lutherans, like Early. Thinly conceived and timidly executed.

A young Mormon girl finds herself torn between retribution and forgiveness in <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">The Deep End of the Ocean author Mitchard's latest. Twelve-year-old Veronica "Ronnie" Swan witnesses the murder of her two sisters in her family's yard in tiny Cedar City, Utah. Murderer Scott Early is immediately apprehended, but is diagnosed with schizophrenia and ends up spending just three years in a state mental hospital. The rest of Ronnie's family turns to their faith to forgive Early, visiting him just before his release after a battery of drugs have restored him to normalcy. But Ronnie remains angry and haunted by her inability to save her sisters from him, and as she comes of age she tracks Early to San Diego, becomes an EMT, talks his wife into hiring her as a nanny for their infant daughter, and starts planning her vengeance. But as Early's life comes into focus, Ronnie's plan leads to an unexpected, if overly summative, climax. Ronnie progresses from a stock girl-next-door type to a young woman with considerable emotional depth, and Mitchard understatedly portrays her attempts to navigate romance and other interactions as a Mormon raised very "of the Church." The results are sweet and solid. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(May 1)