The Red Thread: A Novel in Three Incarnations Book

How do you avenge — or forgive — your own murder four hundred years after it happened?

Prompted by recurrent dreams, sixteen-year-old Dana Landgrave uncovers an ancient crime that has drawn the same souls together through three lifetimes.

There's nothing sinister about the girl's sunlit twenty-first-century American life in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Yet, centuries ago, terrible things were done — by someone she knows! Could it be her easygoing, easy-to-look-at boyfriend, Chase? Or her younger brother, Ben, who has been confined to a wheelchair since a school bus accident? What about Gianna, her inscrutable enemy on the yearbook staff? Or her eccentric psychotherapist, Dr. Sprague?

As Dana summons courage to reenter the past, each incarnation propels her to new discoveries — and new suspicions — until the threads of all three lives converge in a devastating revelation.

Publishers Weekly

New Hampshire teen Dana Landgrave enters counseling with creepy Dr. Sprague, who repeatedly hypnotizes her in an attempt to find the cause of her eerily real nightmare, in which a boy is being crushed to death by an altar stone. Over the course of these sessions, Dana uncovers "a direct pipeline to two former incarnations," a 16th-century tapestry designer, and an 18th-century painter's assistant. In both cases, what she uncovers about her past behavior disturbs and confuses her. "I don't know who I am anymore, and I'm afraid to find out," she admits. The modern Dana is no jewel hostile and mouthy, she continually pushes her dreamboat boyfriend, Chase, away but the real problem here is that the plot is too contrived to be believed. When not only Sprague but also the demonic yearbook editor who took credit for Dana's photographs turn out to be antagonists in her past lives, Dana asks, "What were the chances?" and readers will, too. Coincidences put Dana in London (her home in a past life) for the summer, and lead her to an open-air market where she finds a 16th-century locket that belonged to one of her former selves and that contains a portrait of the boy in her dreams. Townley (The Great Good Thing) raises an intriguing question about the nature of the soul is it "real, a permanent self that carried over from life to life," Dana wonders but his characters don't explore it. Ages 12-up. (Mar.)