A mystery of murder in the 1930s, solved through the stories of three teens. Something Terrible Happened on Kenmore is set in the 1930s; however, Marci Stillerman never explicitly states that, so the reader must infer the period from mentions of what's popular on the radio. The terrible thing that happened is the truly horrific crime of a murdered five year old girl. Maizy, one of the three teens the story centers around, thinks she may have seen the killer with the girl, but she tries to believe that it isn't true, even as she forms a relationship with the mother of the murdered girl. The other teens are Zane, the boy Maizy likes, and Fred, the new boy in town, who is friends with both Maizy and Zane. The boys know where the severed hand of the dead girl is, but keep it hidden, even though it could help the police catch the killer. As the threads of the story come together to reveal the killer, the teens experience a significant number of additional hardships.
The murder of a child should really be enough, but Stillerman throws in poverty, children who have lost a parent, teen pregnancy, and child pornography. The teens are forced to deal with too many issues in too short a period of time for anything to be satisfactorily resolved. I was overwhelmed by the amount of tragedy. I struggled to stay with the story, and would have liked to feel more compassion for the characters as their worlds collapsed.
