Book Description

Menace stalks the sleepy streets of Amethyst, Texas, in acclaimed mystery writer Steven Saylor's chilling novel of a young woman who goes home for a visit and becomes enmeshed in the search for a missing teenage girl. Menace turns to fear when layers of secrets and mistrust are peeled back to reveal a darkness deeper and more terrifying than anything the young visitor could ever have imagined.

Duty and love of her wheelchair-bound grandmother compel Rue Dunwitty to travel from her new home in San Francisco back to the quiet little Texas town where she was raised.

For Rue, arriving in Amethyst evokes the cozy comfort of returning to a safe haven where everyone knows her name and nothing ever seems to change. Then, in the window of the local grocery store, she sees a sign with a picture of a teenage girl and the question, "Have you seen Dawn?" Rue's bittersweet nostalgia is abruptly replaced by a growing sense of dread.

Dawn is the daughter of a single mother who recently moved to town. When Rue encounters Dawn's twin brother, she is disconcerted by his precocious, brooding intensity. Also unnerving is the change that seems to have come over Rue's old friends. Have they simply grown apart, or is there something more sinister at play?

Then, late at night, Rue sees a strange light in the field outside her grandmother's house, moving across the abandoned farm that once had been home to her father, from whom she is now estranged.

In short order, Rue finds herself confounded by a series of disturbing discoveries -- about the husband of her best friend from high school days; about the intentions of the town's handsome deputy sheriff; about her father, who moved away from Amethyst years ago but may have secretly returned; about her brother, who lives in Austin, but who seems to have taken a leave from both his job and his marriage; and about her boyfriend from San Francisco, who suddenly shows up in town and who seems not to be a stranger there.

Atmospheric and grippingly suspenseful, Have You Seen Dawn? is a thrilling novel of brooding menace, devious twists, and startling surprises. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

A very disturbing story, a bit too disturbing for my taste.
Ooooh, I really didn't like this one. It's not that Saylor wasn't writing a good book. I think most everyone who has read this book, would agree it was fairly well-written. Definitely a good plot, concise delivery of the mystery, okay development of characters. Only complain with the writing was the overuse of the main character's worries and thoughts was very repetitious.

I knew kind of where Saylor was going with this, and from the beginning of the book, he seemed to be capable of writing about this disturbing type of murder mystery that is way too close to real crime stories without giving agonizing details that I find disturbing. That was the problem. First it was a couple of uses of a swearword I find especially offensive after the middle of the book had been reached. From there on it went downhill until the middle of the second to the last chapter, where it was like the gates of filth were let wide open, that Saylor led the reader on with a decent mystery, then descended into the pit.

There is a reason I choose not to read true crime, and I find it disturbing when others do read them. I do read some forensic stuff, more medically inclined as I did do studies in the morgue when I got my neuroscience degree, but these are based on evidence and usually don't go way into the lurid stories that got these people killed. So I really don't appreciate it when a writer misleads me with what I thought was a regular mystery, and it turns into the kind of filth I don't really want to waste brain capacity on. It isn't entertaining. It's just revolting...

Karen Sadler

Good Made-For-TV Movie
I think Have You Seen Dawn would make an exciting made-for-tv movie. Throw in some creepy, eerie music for the soundtrack and use the desolate Texas Hill Country for the background and you'd have the audience on the edge of their chairs & gobbling up popcorn.

Have you seen Steven Saylor?
Because this sure wasn't up to his usual standard.He should have stuck with Gordianus the Finder.

This is a "damsel in distress" mystery. A woman from the big city (San Francisco) returns to the small town in Texas where she was raised, and where a girl has gone missing.

The culprit is obvious from the get-go. Who else but the studly lawman she falls for and who has come to this town from a city where he helped solve (wait for it!) a series of similar murders!

But, of course, in the interim just about everyone except her wheelchair-bound grandmother is thrown in as a red herring.

To give Saylor his due, he writes well and the tone is atmospheric and evocative. Unfortunately, the characters are cardboard and the plot thin.

Back to Rome, Steven!

Alright. It's probably a girl book
and I'm not either a girl or even a gay american but I liked it anyway.Just shows how versatile Saylor really is I guess. I got hooked on the Roman books before I learned that the author was a gay american and by then I had found out he wasn't going to bury me knee deep in homoerotica.
The story moves along very well and unlike some more prescient readers, I really didn't know who the killer was until pretty close to the end.

Good Book. Read it... but be careful if you drive through Goldwaite, Texas.The grocery store is on the east side of hwy 36 and there is or was an elderly lady there who launched her car across the highway every morning without a glance either toward Hamilton or Temple.She may be gone but the skid marks are still there-right in front of the store where she picked up breakfast.

Well written and engaging mystery in small-town Texas
Rue Dunwitty expects a simple vacation when she travels from San Francisco to her childhood home in Amethyst, Texas. Instead, she is intrigued and mystified by grocery store posters asking about a missing teen. Rue can't help digging around and is shocked to find the girl's body--only to have it disappear before the police arrive. Everyone is urging Rue to leave town, but she can't make herself leave her aging grandmother. Except, will Rue herself become the next victim of a serial killer?

Author Steven Saylor draws a vivid picture of small-town Texas life. From its aging Bush for Governor bumper stickers to the whole-town turnout for the high school football team, to the volunteer efforts to search for the missing girl, Amethyst rings true. With plenty of red herrings around, Rue can find plenty of suspects. But is she letting her imagination run away from her?

Saylor hints at important questions in Rue's reflections on sex and rape. Is every man a monster, simply waiting for the opportunity to free himself from the shackles of society?

Mystery fans may find the identity of the killer easy to guess, but Saylor's high-quality writing makes getting there an enjoyable ride. ... Read more

Book Description
Word count: 3166. ... Read more