"The News Where You Are"

This novel by Catherine O'Flynn centers on Frank Allcroft, a TV news anchor in the English town where he grew up. The story is about relationships among people of all ages formed in childhood, at work, and through family connections. Catherine O'Flynn's first novel, "What Was Lost," is not one I have read but I plan to as it is highly praised having won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007. It was also short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and long-listed for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. O'Flynn says in the afterward that she wrote about "loss, memory, and the impact of the shifting city" in her first novel and, after finishing "The News Where You Are" she seems to have written about the same themes again.

The losses O'Flynn writes about aren't always those of death but losses of youth and relationships and perceptions. O'Flynn's characters are well developed and real -- in fact so real that some of them seem to have been drawn straight from the lives of some of my family members.

Although this book isn't a mystery per se, it does have a mystery set within it and uncovered by Frank in his effort to not let anyone be forgotten. He has a habit of working with the coroner to try to identify the next of kin in cases where there seems to be little information about a person who has died naturally but doesn't really warrant the police spending a lot of time investigating any family connections. Frank,to his wife's frustration, spends his off work hours on these cases and it appears to be something he can't help doing and can't bring himself to give up. It all leads to a surprising but very satisfying ending.