Book review: The Buried Book by D. M. Pulley

The fifty-first book I read in 2018 was The Buried Book, D. M. Pulley's sophomore effort following up on The Dead Key.  This book is set in 1952 in Detroit and deals with a nine-year-old boy whose mother goes missing under suspicious circumstances. 

Pulley does a decent job telling the story in the voice of a rather naive and inexperienced boy.  Unfortunately, the book of the title purports to be a diary Jasper's mother kept at the age of fourteen and is utterly unbelievable.  Does even a talented author with an eye to a contract for a memoir write her diary in the voice of a first-person narrator, complete with dialogue and eloquent descriptions of the smallest minutiae of her day?  For instance, would she, when describing arriving somewhere to make a delivery to a particular person, deliver verbatim the exact words spoken by the woman who tells her the man she's looking for is around back rather than just elide the scene with "He wasn't inside, but I found him around back?"  When does the youngest of four children on a working farm with no electricity who constantly complains about how many chores she has to do in how little time find the time to write a secret diary in such painstaking detail? 

Many of Pulley's set-pieces are evocative, particularly the brief sanctuary Jasper finds with a peep-show dancer and the school he attends while living on his uncle's farm, but the overarching mystery isn't terribly compelling.  The writing is more impressive than the plotting in this book.