The Weight of Blood: A Novel [Laura McHugh] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. For fans of Gillian Flynn, Scott Smith, and Daniel Woodrell comes a. Facebook author page: Laura McHughLaura McHugh's debut novel, The Weight of Blood, won an International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel, a.
Reviewed By April 22nd, 2014 Like many suspense novels, starts with a body and a mystery. Buddy Snell, a photographer for the Ozark County paper, is looking for anything interesting to put on his front page when he discovers the dismembered remains of Cheri Stoddard in the hollow of a tree across from the small town’s general store. The discovery sends Lucy Dane, Cheri’s only friend, searching for clues to explain the murder. Unlike her friends and neighbors, Lucy refuses to assume that her friend’s death came at the hands of an unknown outsider, but Lucy does not expect the trail of clues to lead her closer and closer to home. We soon learn that Lucy’s own mother, Lila, met a similarly mysterious end twenty years earlier, and as Lucy delves deeper into the troubling history of Cheri’s disappearance and death, she begins to uncover more than she wants to know about her own family.
Just as Cheri’s severed head was first found tangled in tree roots, Lucy finds herself tangled in the complex roots of her family tree, where she must weigh loyalty to family against her own innate moral code. Laura McHugh’s debut is a potboiler of a novel, confronting the long-hidden economy of sex trafficking in current day America. Building Settlement Marker Installation Management here.
McHugh does not flinch as she writes her way into this world. Instead she levels a direct gaze on the scandalous treatment of young women throughout this country—and levels our gaze along with her own. The plot of McHugh’s novel was inspired by a true story in her hometown of Lebanon, Missouri, where a man was convicted of torturing a mentally impaired young woman whom he had coerced into being a sex slave.
The national statistics show that the scope of the problem spreads far larger. Shared Hope International reports that human trafficking has become a $9.8-billion-per-year industry in the United States, with the sex trade accounting for a significant part of that economy. According to Soroptimist, “One overriding factor in the proliferation of trafficking is the fundamental belief that the lives of women and girls are expendable.
In societies where women and girls are undervalued or not valued at all, women are at greater risk for being abused, trafficked, and coerced into sex slavery.” In The Weight of Blood, McHugh shows us the disturbing depth of this belief in female expendability as the disappearances of girls from poor, depressed households repeatedly go under-investigated. Even the girls’ mothers seem unconcerned, believing their daughters to have “run off” of their own free will. The novel’s grisly opening gains added significance as we come to understand that, even when she was alive, Cheri was never seen as anything more than a body. With so few of her neighbors and none of her family invested in her safety or wellbeing, Cheri’s living body was put to work, further compromising her value as a person at the same time that the value of her female body was exploited.