Echoes of the Lost, the new mystery by Oregon-based author Cindy Brown, takes several fresh approaches to the classic whodunnit. Most striking is her evocative sense of place. She captures the oppressive feel of winter in the rainy, chilly city where she lives and backdrops a number of its problems in a from-the-ground-up, insightful manner. The Portland area is notorious for having a large number of homeless – an estimated 12,000 in late 2025 – and she sweeps them into her narrative. Especially compelling is her handling of what is now called neurodivergence, in all its varied forms and origins: unstable environments, substance abuse, mental illness and, in the case of her main character, traumatic brain injury.
Sterling McCaffrey is a widower living alone, a former Portland police detective on extended leave after his injury. He may be able to return to the force, he may not. Meanwhile, he’s trying to deal with a brain that doesn’t reliably make connections or remember what it should. He can’t even drive. Very late one rainy night, a toddler shows up on his front porch, and he has to figure out what to do about it – how to keep the boy safe and how to find his mother. Both these tasks turn out to be much more complicated than he expects.
The next morning, his first impulse is to walk the boy to his former precinct house. Their route takes them past a doorway hang-out spot for a group of homeless men. They know the kid, and the kid knows them. They call him Fuzzy and tell Ster his mother is a homeless woman who calls herself Jane Doe – a name used in the US for an unidentified female.
Brown does an excellent job describing the different personalities of several of the unhoused characters, about five altogether. She doesn’t gloss over their problems and the bad decisions and worse luck that created their current circumstances, but she makes them real people, with strong personalities, some good, some not. Kind of like a Greek chorus, they appear and comment on Ster’s frustrating quest.
One thing he does know is that Fuzzy mustn’t end up in a bad foster care situation. Ster and his late wife adopted a daughter, Lydia, who had been abused. Unfortunately, he and the adult Lydia are now estranged, and he doesn’t know where she is. Because he was once a foster parent, the overstretched authorities are willing to let him keep Fuzzy, at least for a time.
Before long a Jane Doe is found floating in the Willamette River. Is she Fuzzy’s mom or even Lydia? The county medical examiner is a friend and lets Ster see the body. The dead stranger was punched in the face hard enough to break a bone. Most likely, the blow precipitated her backward fall into the frigid water. So, murder.
It isn’t especially likely the police force will vigorously investigate the wintertime death of a homeless person. Ster will have to gather information on his own. Aided by the Fuzzy’s toddler charm, he collects a diverse set of allies including a young policeman, star-struck by Ster’s reputation; the librarian who helped Jane find books for Fuzzy; Spidey, one of the homeless men who, naturally, has a spiderweb tattoo, as well as a meth habit and schizophrenia; Rev. Reb, who runs a church-based social services program; and Bonnie, who was convicted and later exonerated for murdering her husband.
Several of these key characters don’t manage to tell the same story twice. Nor do they tell everything they know. They hint at Lydia’s presence. Trust, like truth, is hard-won and easy to lose. Given Ster’s problems hooking facts together, inconsistent and false information make his work even harder. Still, pursuing Jane’s case may bring him back into Lydia’s orbit, which provides a strong emotional incentive to get to the bottom of Jane’s death.
The tension in the story goes beyond Ster’s need to sort truth from misdirection. As he asks questions, it becomes clear that someone doesn’t want his investigation to continue. Anonymous threats, a break-in. But who wants him to stop and, most of all, why?
I enjoyed this mystery a great deal and appreciated the way Brown developed her characters in a way that is interesting, realistic and nonjudgmental.
You might try WM Stage’s Down and Out in the River City or Lisa Gardner’s Before She Disappeared.
Ooligan Press
Print/Kindle
£13.87
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
