YOU WILL PAY

4 stars out of 5

Sex, lies and yes, even videotapes - the stuff of which soap operas are made - all come together in coastal small-town Oregon in this rather lusty novel. Murder? Check. Incest? Check. Throw in an Elmer Gantry-like leader of a summer camp for teenagers that's been closed for two decades, and you've got a solid start to your summer beach reading.

Camp Horseshoe closed after two of the still-teenage female counselors,   a hired hand and a convict who escaped from a nearby prison went missing. Now - 20 years later - Lucas Dalton, detective with the local sheriff's department and son of the aforementioned preacher man, is investigating the discovery of what appears to be human scull in a small cave on the bank of the water at which one of the missing counselors, Eleanor (Elle) was last seen. Complicating matters is that Lucas was Elle's serious love interest at the time; also, several of the other female counselors, led by Jo-Beth Chancellor, reportedly tried to put the fear of God into Monica shortly before she disappeared.

Today, all the camp participants, including Lucas, have gone on with their lives (mostly successfully), but the secrets they buried all those years ago now threaten to bring them down. Semi-estranged from his preacher father, Jeremiah, and his beautiful ex-stepmother Naomi, Lucas has secrets of his own that he hopes don't see the light of day. But as all the counselors involved in the scheme to scare Monica decide to return to align the stories they will once again offer to police, they face a nosy reporter who's desperate to get the real story for an online tabloid - a woman who was just as nosy as a camper 20 years ago. 

Chapters switch from viewpoints of the characters in the present and that fateful summer at camp - a technique of which I'm not fond, but it does allow details to be released little by little that shed more light on what really happened. Admittedly, that got a bit hard for me to follow in that there are so many characters to remember; besides that, there seemed to me to be an excessive amount of repetition from one recollection to another (although to be honest, that probably helped my aging brain keep all those characters straight). 

Tying up all the loose ends in one tidy package also tested the limits of believability for me, but then keep in mind I was a church camper back in the day, and the closest I ever got to high drama was having a bit of a crush - as did most of the other female campers - on a young, super-cute minister-counselor. All that meant, though, was that we sang "Kumbaya, My Lord" louder than necessary around the campfire in hopes of getting his attention. Kinky sex? Murder and mayhem? Fuhgettaboutit!

If you're looking for off-kilter characters in creepy settings, give this one a try. My thanks to the publisher, via NetGalley, for providing me with an advance copy to read and review. 

You Will Pay by Lisa Jackson (Kensington, May 2017); 416 pp.