Uncover secrets of Into The Fall
By M. CLARE HAEFNER | Cover courtesy of Thomas & Mercer
Thrillers are not my usual vacation read, but I could not put down Tamara L. Miller’s Into The Fall (Thomas & Mercer, February 2025) during a recent trip to Europe.
The premise intrigued me earlier this year when I purchased the book, but it wasn’t until I started a nine-hour flight to London in late June that I finally cracked the cover.
I was immediately swept into the story.
Sarah Anderson wakes in a tent near a river in the Canadian Shield, wondering why her husband, Matthew, isn’t nearby. Briefly leaving her sleeping children to search, Sarah notices their canoe is missing and assumes Matthew took an early-morning trip. The area along the Mirabelle River near Nagadon Lake is like a second home to Matthew, but when he doesn’t return as a big storm approaches, Sarah suspects something is wrong and seeks help.
At one point in her search of the shoreline, Miller writes, “(Sarah) couldn’t tell where the sky ended or began, as if the Mirabelle had swallowed the world.”
After a passing boater gets Sarah and her young children to safety, Officer Rob Boychuck launches a search in the wilderness for any sign of Matthew. His team finds the canoe, but no further sign of the man. As Matthew’s trail goes cold, Sarah finds herself in a yearlong quest to discover what really happened that morning in the wilderness.
In many of the thrillers I’ve read, the main characters are law enforcement officials or amateur sleuths working to solve a case. But in Into The Fall, Miller takes a different and refreshing approach. The narrative focuses on Sarah as she tries to unravel what happened to her husband, while alternately sharing the viewpoints of her estranged sister Izzy, who uproots her life in Toronto to come to Ottawa to help Sarah and the kids, and Officer Boychuck, who vows to keep searching until the truth is revealed.
It soon becomes clear to the reader (and Boychuck) that Sarah knows more than she’s saying about Matthew’s disappearance, but is she a killer (like Detective Ritter believes) or a victim of a man who has vanished before?
The heart of Into The Fall is secrets. “Secrets, Sarah thought, can be gluttonous beasts. They settle into your core and feed on experiences,” Miller writes at one point as she deftly weaves the narrative back and forth in time, slowly revealing those secrets as characters search for answers.
Into The Fall is a thrilling look inside a family struggling with grief and clinging on to hope amid a failing marriage and an unraveling web of secrets as they seek understanding and a way forward once the truth is finally revealed.
“Though it didn‘t look like it in the stillness, the water was always moving, changing, flowing to someplace else,” Miller writes, a perfect metaphor for life and the secrets we all keep.
