Review of Salt Bones by Jennifer Givhan

The corruption and dark underbellies throughout, the lurking folklore figure that seems to signal death and destruction, and the despairing community history of missing women set a brooding, ominous tone, yet Salt Bones often felt like a young-adult mystery. The reveal is immensely disturbing and makes various characters' sinister suspicions feel more than warranted.

Jennifer Givhan's mystery-thriller-horror novel Salt Bones made it onto multiple best-of lists for 2025, and I've been in a mystery-reading mood this month, so this novel went to the top of my library audiobook list.

In Salt Bones, three generations of strong women in a dysfunctional Mexicali family struggle to come to terms with the disappearances and loss of beloved friends and family members, all women.

The story is a dark, moody look at the underbelly of some dark business: mistreated cattle in a slaughterhouse; aggressive exposure of truth through environmental activism; and a series of women snatched from the area, seemingly never to be heard from again.

A key character has existed on the outskirts of local society for decades, and a rich, evil legend has grown up around him, so that many in the community believe he is the woman-snatcher--and that he snatched his own daughter. But we find that our main protagonist Mal has been having a secret, fulfilling relationship with him for years, and that, unbeknown to Mal's daughters, he is their father. Yet strong-willed Mal, puzzlingly, doesn't speak up when his name is maligned throughout their town, and she has never revealed to her girls that he is family.

Mal's life is made more complicated by her mother's dementia and verbal abuse around Mal's sister's long-ago disappearance, the lingering pain of her own loss, her daughters' secrets, the bro-like male power plays of the men who bring their game to her for butchering, and, ultimately, and more upsetting than any of the rest of these, by the disappearance of her youngest daughter partway through the story.

Mal's younger brother/son (he is biologically her brother but she raised him as a son; her daughers call him "bruncle" because he is both a brother to them and their uncle) is a local cop, and her older brother is running for political office. Everyone pitches in to help try to find Mal's girl, but when Mal finds out what's actually happened to her and what's happened to the other missing women, the shocking reality of dark deeds layered throughout the commuity comes from multiple sources and shakes up everything.

Some characters (Mal's twin niece and nephew, her browbeaten father, her mean-as-a-snake mother--to whom patient-as-a-saint Mal miraculously doesn't even mutter a telling-off) often felt like caricatures, and the novel largely felt like a young adult story to me. In multiple instances, a smell of rot on the breath is covered up by alcohol or other smells; this felt a little too on the nose for me as an alert to the dark undersides to the story.

I was intrigued by the disturbing, mysterious magical realism imagery of the dark woman-horse, sometimes beheaded or skull-like, often chasing prey, which seems to refer to the legend of Siguanaba--although in this novel she seems aimed at guiding Mal to the difficult truths rather than luring her to her destruction.

In Salt Bones, Givhan explores Latina culture, Indigenous issues, folklore, instinct, tough women, magical realism, horrifying betrayals, corruption due to wealth and power, and the strength of family.

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Jennifer Givhan is also the author of River Woman, River Demon; Trinity Sight; Jubilee; and other novels.