• Limetown by Cote Smith, Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie
• Reviewed by Virginia McCreedy, PoMo Public Library
They all vanished into thin air one day — 327 people. The last contact the outside world had with them was a phone call to emergency services. What happened to the residents of Limetown, Tenn.?
That’s the premise of the chart-topping podcast Limetown.
The book of the same name is a recently published prequel written by Cote Smith along with the podcast’s two creators, Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie.
The novel alternates between two stories: One revolves around Lia Haddock, whose family is falling apart ever since Limetown happened.
Her uncle Emile is one of the missing residents and her mom is pulling her own disappearing act these days, gone for weeks and lying about her whereabouts. While Lia is doing journalism studies in Australia, she finds a newspaper article left specifically for her about the death of a scientist.
Someone wants her to investigate, but who? And how is this related to Limetown?
The other story is about young Emile, years before the Limetown incident. His brother Jacob, Lia’s father, was the rising star of the track team with a college scholarship waiting for him upon graduation while Emile was the school’s “weird kid.”
When Emile got into some serious trouble, they decided to run away from their foster parents. With nowhere to go, they went looking for their missing mother.
They didn’t find her but came across a motel with a team of young workers. The motel’s owner offered to fully fund Jacob’s education and get him back to school as long as Emile agreed to stay and help with their experiments. Emile had a special ability they were very interested in: the power to read minds.
For fans of the podcast, the novel provides an illuminative back-story to the creation of Limetown. For newcomers, the plot still offers plenty of suspense and conspiracy reminiscent of The X-Files.
As Lia has been told in her investigation, the most important thing to ask yourself when reading this book is: Are you asking the right questions?
