The Comfort of Monsters

A Novel

By: Willa C. Richards

Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski

""A riveting page-turner that begs to be read quickly, compulsively. But page by page, this electrifying debut by Willa Richards weaves an increasingly complicated and dark tale of guilt, fury, and the danger of building stories on that shakiest of foundations, memory."" —Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times bestselling author of Valentine

Set in Milwaukee during the “Dahmer summer” of 1991, a remarkable debut novel for fans of Mary Gaitskill and Gillian Flynn about two sisters—one who disappears, and one who is left to pick up the pieces in the aftermath.

In the summer of 1991, a teenage girl named Dee McBride vanished in the city of Milwaukee. Nearly thirty years later, her sister, Peg, is still haunted by her sister's disappearance. Their mother, on her deathbed, is desperate to find out what happened to Dee so the family hires a psychic to help find Dee’s body and bring them some semblance of peace.

The appearance of the psychic plunges Peg back to the past, to those final carefree months when she last saw Dee—the summer the Journal Sentinel called “the deadliest . . . in the history of Milwaukee.” Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s heinous crimes dominated the headlines and overwhelmed local law enforcement. The disappearance of one girl was easily overlooked.

Peg’s hazy recollections are far from easy for her to interpret, assess, or even keep clear in her mind. And now digging deep into her memory raises doubts and difficult—even terrifying—questions. Was there anything Peg could have done to prevent Dee’s disappearance? Who was really to blame for the family's loss? How often are our memories altered by the very act of voicing them? And what does it mean to bear witness in a world where even our own stories are inherently suspect?

A heartbreaking page-turner, Willa C. Richards’s novel is the story of a broken family looking for answers in the face of the unknown, and asks us to reconsider the power and truth of memory.

Sublime Agony

The book is well written, the story compelling to the point of distraction and the narrator character multi-faceted. These are all the elements of a great mystery novel and the book is, indeed, well worth the time. In a way, though, I wanted to throw my listening device against the wall toward the end because it became clear that there would be no satisfaction in the book’s finale. If the Ms. Richard’s goal was to leave us as bereft of answers as the members of Dee’s family
then she succeeded masterfully.

Repetitive !!!!

This book was hard to finish… just kept repeating … I stuck in there to find no ending. I get that many missing girls are never found but this story could have ended much earlier without missing a thing!

Great narration - mediocre story

First of all, the narration by Stacey Glemboski was excellent and allowed me to continue listening even though I wasn't entirely connected or invested in the story. The plot was fascinating - a girl goes missing in the same area and during the same time frame that Dahmer was actively killing boys. So the story focuses on the search for the missing girl as well as the aftermath of Dahmer's arrest. I found the moments that were focused on the family of Dahmer's family to be much more interesting than the main plot. Maybe the moving back and forth between timelines made the story feel disjointed and was why I was unable to truly connect to the main characters or their relationship to one another. I just found the story to be bland overall and the ending was completely insufficient.

The story went on and on and got no where

the main character, the subcharacters, all awfully obnoxious. the only good parts of the book are the mentionings of Dahmer. which wasn't that much or anything new that can't be googled. I finish the book hoping this wasn't a waste of my time and money, but it was. the narrator was good, the story just wasn't.