Drusilla Campbell draws images that transmute themselves into entire discourses. The blood orange is the best example (fittingly). I could taste the orange, smell the tang from oils on my fingers, feel the rind under my nails. But its symbolism in the book was just as strong. Dana's 7-year-old daughter has been kidnapped, and everyone believes the kidnapper is retaliating for her attorney-husband's defense of an accused child abuser. The book opens when Bailey has been gone for months, and the push to find her is losing steam. Dana stands in a nearly deserted church basement looking at a bulletin board covered with sticky circles: red for task forces, green for counties papered with flyers, yellow for ID photo distribution. Dana wishes they'd used stars like Bailey brought home from school. "No one celebrated circles," she thinks. "Circles went nowhere and only emphasized the futility and frustration of the search for Bailey that had started in one place, gone all around the world, and ended up right back where it started, with a big zero. Circles meant nothing; circles were holes to fall into. Dana wanted constellations like the Big Dipper, Orion, and the reliable North Star pointing the way to Bailey." See what I mean? She starts with an image, turns it into a discussion and a symbol, and neatly returns to the image. I picked this up for the title. When I was in high school, I dated a young man who worked at an experimental citrus farm run by the local land grant college. He used to bring me gifts of exotic citrus, and I remember well my first taste of blood oranges. I rediscovered them in Itally two summers ago, where I drank blood orange juice every morning for breakfast and nearly had an orgasm from a blood orange granita. So the titular image was a walk among fond memories for me. But I found myself just as delighted by the exquisite language. The pacing is perfect. The characters are real (even the ones that are really icky). There was one plot point that made me groan. I won't include a spoiler, but an event takes place in Italy that we've seen a hundred times. However, since Blood Orange is otherwise perfect, we'll forgive Campbell her one little cliché.