I didn't go to college but I have many of the insights

Can you ever really leave your past behind?  Even if you choose to totally re-invent yourself?  That seems to be the central question in the novel Long Black Veil by Jennifer Finney Boylan. The novel starts out on a promising (for me, anyway) note when 8 people (mostly college students) decide to investigate an old abandoned prison.  What could possibly go wrong?  Things do go wrong, but for me the main wrong turn was away from what I hoped would be a spooky mystery into  . . . I'm not exactly sure what, but the early Gothic spookiness quickly evaporated and didn't return.

The book begins in 1980 when college friends Quentin, Casey, Tripper, Wailer, Maisie and Rachel, along with Maisie's brother Ben and Quentin's German professor Herr Krystal decide on a whim to visit the ruins of the abandoned prison.  They soon discover it has been taken over by feral cats, as well as a very creepy/haunted feeling atmosphere.  As young boys are wont to do (especially in novels), young Ben runs off after a cat, causing the group to splinter in an attempt to locate him.  Have these people never seen a horror movie?  Don't they know you never split up the group?  Apparently not.  By the time Ben is located, one member of the group has disappeared.

After this event, the story shifts to the present day, when the remaining college friends are in their late 50s and no longer in touch.  The main narrator of the book, one of the students, has left the past behind in a major way and is living with a spouse and stepchild in rural Maine.  Although this person has been married for 15 years, of course just now things in the marriage are becoming a little strained, and a big secret from the past is revealed.  At the same time, a skeleton has been discovered in the abandoned prison (which is being revitalized) and so the mystery of WHERE the missing student is has been answered. The police investigation begins to try to figure out what happened so long ago and the former friends will be reunited as secrets from the past are revealed.

I was intrigued by the description of this book, hoping it would be a creepy mystery, but sadly it's not.  A major problem is that each chapter jumps around both in terms of time period and character being discussed.  It was extremely confusing to try to figure out who was speaking each time a new chapter began.  Also, at the beginning and the end of the book, characters are forever spouting German, for no apparent reason.  There was a lot of description about the old abandoned prison, which also didn't really add anything to the story but served to add to the confusion.  Perhaps if I had known going in that it wasn't going to be an eerie ghost story or mystery I might have enjoyed the book more.  As it was, I was frustrated by all the shifts in characters and although there was a curve ball thrown in at the end, I was still disappointed.

Disclaimer:  I received a copy of Long Black Veil from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review