Strange book.

Interesting character.

Andi Oliver is walking across the plains when she comes upon a woebegone donkey in a field. She rescues him, continues with him to the next town--Kingdom--and stops for a bit there.

The thing is, she has no memory of anything beyond a year ago. And she's got a bit of a savior complex about animals. She gets work at a corporate pig farm outside Kingdom and makes nothing but trouble for them, eventually hiring an attorney to sue them for multiple Ag. Dept. infractions. This, of course, earns her no friends. Between the corporate guys wanting to get rid of her and some guy who is following her around from Idaho across Montana and into North Dakota, she has every right to be freaked out.

She's close to being completely unbelievable, but her sense of humor and wry awareness of how she must look to everyone else redeems her as well as the book.

This is one of her best books. Some of it reminded me very much of Sinclair's The Jungle. Highly recommended.

I started out reading this as an audiobook, but stopped because the descriptions of animal abuse were so disturbing. I am already convinced of the evils of factory farming, and felt no need to wallow in the gruesome details. So I borrowed the book from the library, so I could skim over the unpleasant parts and because I wanted to see the basic mystery solved, about Andi's identity and the man following her, but No! no resolution, no answers, Andi drifts on to another town, all relationships abandoned. Very unsatisfying. I love Ms Grimes' writing and her other books, but this one disappointed.

excellent story!

The story was a great continuation; however, there was NO ending to the story or to the series and I see no other books listed for the series. Very irritating.

Too much like Hotel Paradise--you got your chatty crowd at the diner, you got your wonderfully kind sheriff, you got your dreamlike quality to the narration, you got your annoying cab driver (who takes cabs anyway? what is it with Martha Grimes and taxis?), you got your surrogate parent figures for the innocent but wise young heroine, you got the mystery novel that never even lets you know what the mystery is, much less the solution...Which works in Hotel Paradise and the followups, set somewhere in the past, somewhere in New England, but doesn't quite work in modern day North Dakota.

The characters are bizarrely black and white. Grimes is too good of a writer to be doing this through ineptitude, so there must be a reason why people are either instantly kindred spirits with Andi (including the hit man originally hired to kill her) or instantly want to rape and torture her. And yes, the vivid descriptions of the pig farm and slaughterhouse let you know what the overriding purpose of the book is. Unsettling, at the very least. But all the same, it is Martha Grimes, and I do find myself rooting for Andi, and wanting to know what happens and what happened to her.