The Girl Goes Home

Tags:  Mystery, Thrillers,

In The Girl Goes Home, book four of the Emily Calby series, we catch up with twenty-four-year-old Emily as she is launching her legal career in Memphis. True to her nature, she has chosen to represent the voiceless and downtrodden, the people who most need a lawyer, rather than those who can most afford them.

As she’s wrapping up one of her first cases in Memphis, another young lawyer, Zach Skellar, has left the Big Law grind of Chicago and set up shop as a small-town attorney in rural Georgia. Among the old case files of the one-man firm he purchased from a retired local, he finds a carefully sealed envelope containing the birth certificate of Samuel Calby.

The Girl Goes Home, by Dorian Box

Familiar with the infamous Calby murders, he wonders if this is the same Samuel Calby whose family was killed in a home invasion thirteen years earlier. He tracks down Emily and asks if she’s interested in looking at the document.

If you’ve read any of the previous Emily novels, you know her old lament that “trouble seems to follow me.” The birth certificate names a member of Dilfer County’s corrupt ruling clan, the Wilburs, as her paternal grandfather. When Emily starts asking questions, the Wilburs, who control both the county police and the courts, react violently. She seems to have hit on a sore spot with the local oligarchs, and of course, that only piques her interest.

There’s another dimension to this mystery that goes all the way back to book one. Emily’s father died in an accident on the Wilbur farm a year before the rest of her family was murdered. She had always accepted the story of the accident at face value. But as she digs in now, she finds that some of the facts don’t add up. And the only witness to her father’s death appears to have given clues immediately after the tragic event that something was amiss.

As Emily attempts to investigate her family’s past through the normal legal channels, she is thwarted at every turn. Judge Gallison Wilbur refuses to unseal the records Emily needs because they may incriminate his family. When she takes her investigation outside the courts, Sheriff Quentin Wilbur and Deputy Bo Wilbur harass and intimidate her at every step.

How do you find truth when the cops and the courts are determined to conceal it? Well, if you’re Emily Calby, you take matters into your own hands. The Wilburs pick a fight they’re used to winning, only this time, they’re up against someone more resourceful and determined than anyone they’ve faced before.

I won’t give away how the story unfolds, but I will say that Lucas and Kiona are back in their supporting roles, and Zach is a welcome new addition. Briley Carr, the journalist who has been a thorn in Emily’s side, actually comes in useful for once, and Emily takes some time to reconnect with childhood friends.

The core of the story, however, is the mystery, and Emily’s tenacity in solving it. It pays off eventually, in ways neither Emily nor the reader expect, but it takes a whole lot of work and risk and white-knuckle moments to get there.