Book Review: Sixty

Title: Sixty

Author: Yvette Walker

Date: 2024

Publisher: Positively Joy  Ministries

Quote: "Is this Linda Radcliffe? The reporter...I know you won't remember me. My daughter, Sarah, was killed..."

Linda remembers. It was only the ugliest murder story she had to report in her career. Readers don't have to read all the gruesome details Linda will never forget; we know they're there. Sarah was the victim of a serial murderer. After helping police find the man and the state kill him, Linda left town; partly because the murder case was so nasty, partly because a personal relationship with her editor was interfering with her work. But when Sarah's mother invites her back to help her through the twentieth anniversary of the murder, Linda comes back. Just possibly something beyond herself, in her fictional universe, impels her to return. Her feelings about returning are mixed.

The same man, Mark, is still editing the same newspaper. He and Linda have married and divorced other people in the intervening twenty years. There's still a mutual attraction.

Sarah's mother, Beverly, has adopted a beautiful little girl who turned up just after Sarah died. Jasmine, now in college, reminds some people of Sarah. She even has a similar birthmark; some people think it must be intentional, it looks so much like the numeral 60.

The policeman who used to give Linda information she could report has been demoted to a lower-paid job, directing traffic on a busy street corner. He always was a smaller, less intimidating policeman the department valued most for his public relations skills, his charming extrovert personality.

And a mysterious hooded figure has been stalking Jasmine. Luckily she can run faster than it can, because the figure creeps her out. She thinks it's a ghost.

This is a thriller, despite early hints that it might turn into a romance (it doesn't). That ghost is solid enough that all of the other characters are in danger. Mark will have to help Linda. Linda will have to help Mark. And can both of them together protect Jasmine? 

As a thriller this novel is satisfactory on its own, but the story goes on. The book as sold mentions a sequel. By now there might be more than one sequel.

This is definitely not a Sunday School story but the characters are Christians, as is their author, and a scene takes place in a church. Language is clean. Sex and violence clearly happen in the story but only in one scene do we see characters in a condition that has traditionally been considered obscene because enacting it on stage put actors in danger. (Eroticized violence: in real life some hatecrimes against women consist of nonsexual violence elaborated to a preposterous degree as a sort of psychological substitute for the rape the criminal is not able to commit.) Moral standards are conservative and are generally accepted in a "traditional" way--the "good" girl who "made the mistake" that produced Jasmine is expected to suffer considerably more than the "good" boy involved, to achieve the same level of repentance and reclaim their status in the community, e.g. If you want to believe that American morals have changed, you might not like this story. If you accept that Humanist morality may have displaced traditional Christian views in some social circles but that moral views in the small towns of the heartland are the same as they've always been, you'll probably enjoy it at least as a one-time diversion. 

The author refers to novelist Terry Macmillan in this book. Sixty is a shorter, simpler story than the multi-character novels for which Macmillan is known; I think, partly for that reason, it has the potential to be a better movie.