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Liquid Bones is a novel comprised of chapters told from the perspective of one of the five key characters. Emilia is a recent college graduate, broke, and on her way to North Dakota to care for her last living relative. Luke is an art dealer whose real passion is snowboarding. Gavin and Caleb are friends of his; the former is a basketball player-turned-coach, and the latter is afflicted by unpredictable and unwarranted visions of things he could not have otherwise known. The final character, known as “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” is a former psychiatrist and hypnotherapist who turns into a seemingly deranged killer, creating a pattern to determine his victims. The novel opens with the Emperor’s account of his first murder, the victim being an escaped prison convict. Believing that a prisoner would hardly be missed, the Emperor indulges a murderous fantasy, and then cannot stop there. He becomes a serial murderer. As a literature aficionado (hence the title he gives himself), the Emperor of Ice Cream uses a book of poems to determine his next victims. Page by page, he finds someone who fits the poem, and kills that person. He keeps the bodies in an abandoned house in the woods of North Dakota. There, he is discovered by Emilia, a stranger from Illinois who became stranded when her car broke down. She does not fit the profile of the next intended victim, so he cannot kill her. Instead, he makes her forget what she saw in that house. Luke, Caleb, and Gavin find Emilia unconscious in her car, and they take her to Luke’s house in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. Just as the Emperor intended, she does not remember seeing dead bodies in the house in the woods, and she is afflicted by the gap in her memory. She continues on her way to see her cancer-stricken aunt in the western part of the state, but not before she and Luke develop a romantic connection. However, they spend the next few months apart. The Emperor continues his murder spree, but the bodies of the disappeared are never found; the public does not know what fate befell the missing. The story takes a turn when one of the significant characters, Gavin, turns up missing as well. Caleb and Luke are overcome with worry over their friend’s disappearance. Events begin to unfold all at once—Emilia returns to Cannon Ball to see Luke, and the Emperor almost succeeds in killing her, now that he has come to a more fitting poem in his book that could justify killing her. Meanwhile, Caleb is tormented by the mystery of Gavin’s disappearance. When his clairvoyance fails to give him any clues, Caleb embarks on a vision quest, a spiritual but potentially perilous voyage inspired by the traditions of the surrounding Native American tribes of the Dakotas. Caleb gets the answers he sought, but at the cost of winding up in the hospital. Emilia flees once again, and the Emperor makes his own startling revelation that quells any hope for the missing to be recovered alive. The ending of Liquid Bones contains many surprises, perhaps the most shocking one being the truth about what the Emperor does with his victims’ remains. The novel is filled with literary allusions that subtly pay tribute to the works of great authors, defies convention by continuing on where other books might end, and keeps the reader on edge throughout.

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