The Brahmin Girl

THE BRAHMIN GIRLThis is a fictional story of the brutal murders of two women, spanning a forty-five-year period: Libby Browne, a 17-year-old savant, murdered in the remote forests of Maine in 1965 and Darcy Farrell, an FBI agent, shot to death in the tidewater reaches of the Chesapeake Bay in 2010. It is told in the first-person narrative voices of three individual characters: Carrabassett Police Chief Tom Bradley; then graduate Northeastern criminology student Darcy Farrell; and retired FBI agent Lyle Beckwith. While engaged in a summer intern program in Carrabassett, Maine, in 1985, Farrell breaks open and solves the twenty-year-old cold case murder of Libby Browne. Twenty-five years later, Beckwith becomes consumed with finding and avenging the 2010 murder of his then wife Darcy, focusing on a shortlist of prime suspects, all of whom are his former crime subjects, identified by the FBI's psychological profile team. Grieving and emotionally distraught, he identifies and pursues the killer on his own rogue, clandestine initiative, rejecting help from the FBI. This compelling and suspense-driven novel was honored as a finalist in the 2022 Page Turner Book Awards in London.

-- John Picciano