At age 13, Sydney Singleton discovered an old photograph tucked away in a drawer in her paternal grandmother’s guest room. It was a portrait of a Black girl just entering her teen years — a girl who looked a lot like Sydney.
Next morning, Sydney asked her grandmother about it. The woman, her voice “firm as the oak tree on her front lawn,” would say only this: “We don’t talk about Carol.”
Two decades later, Sydney, now a married woman in her mid-30s, flies from her Los Angeles home to Raleigh, North Carolina, to help prepare her late grandmother’s home for sale. There, she and her younger sister, Sasha, find the photograph again. They also find Carol’s diary concealed above a ceiling panel in the guest room closet.
So begins Kristen L. Berry’s fine debut novel, “We Don’t Talk About Carol,” a tale that is at once an exploration of family secrets, a 60-year-old cold case investigation and a damning indictment of the short shrift missing Black girls get from both the authorities and the media.
Carol, it turns out, was Sydney’s late father’s older sister. Her diary, written when she was about 16, reveals that she had an older boyfriend, aspired to be a singer and planned to run away to Detroit to try out with Motown. Carol’s family, believing the child had run off, never filed a missing person report.
So Sydney, a former investigative reporter, feels compelled to discover what happened to the aunt she never knew existed. Before long, she learns that Carol was one of six Black teenage girls who disappeared from the same Raleigh neighborhood 60 years ago and were dismissed as runaways by the police.
Sydney’s investigation promptly turns into a quest to learn the fates of all of them. Along the way, she finds allies among the missing girls’ families, cold crime podcast enthusiasts and a Raleigh homicide detective.
The result is a well-written, emotionally wrenching tale about the generational consequences of evil, the meaning of family and what a single dedicated woman can accomplish.
After the diary is discovered, the plot unfolds slowly as the author introduces us to Sydney’s suicidal father, her emotionally distant mother and her struggle to conceive a baby with her loving husband, Malik. The pace could lead some readers to abandon the book, but don’t. The tale soon picks up speed, taking readers through propulsive a series of revelations, the most sunning of which involves Carol’s fate.
Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the author of the Mulligan crime novels including “The Dread Line.”
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