An exciting read that shines a light on the secret layers that can exist between two people who think they know each other.
This riveting mystery unlocks the secrets of a husband and father’s supposed suicide.
Stone’s debut novel takes readers down South, where a broken family tries to make peace with their recent loss. Sally Mason and her troubled 13-year-old son, Colton, have been reeling since Sally’s husband, Jack, died. The coroner declares Jack’s death a suicide, creating a sharper, more personal pain. Sally becomes determined to find the truth behind her husband's mysterious death, hoping that a changed verdict will ease her son’s mind and put a stop to his acting out. She begins with Jack’s appointment book and is surprised to discover little secrets hidden there, such as several references to Sally’s father, whom she hasn’t spoken to in 15 years. Her curiosity piqued, Sally enlists the help of her father-in-law but is met with his fury and a fiery insistence that she leave things alone. Determined to see what secrets Jack kept hidden from her but seemed to share with others, Sally looks into the meetings Jack jotted down involving her father, centered, she suspects, on a covert business deal. Sally is reluctant to be back in contact with her estranged father, but soon the clues point to an underhanded scheme set up among him, Jack and Jack’s father and involving a property acquisition that should have belonged to Jack. As Sally unearths tales of staggering debts, familial betrayal and lies, she discovers what the cost of truth and how deeply her mother’s love runs. With candor, sensitivity and suspense, this novel weaves together elements of mystery and emotion. Sally’s quest and determination to help her son serve as the catalysts for a host of exciting events. Her dynamic character and the many people she encounters while piecing together her husband’s death—and life—prove to be memorable and well-sketched.
An exciting read that shines a light on the secret layers that can exist between two people who think they know each other.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938749025
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Violet Crown Publishers
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Simmering with tension, this tragic, albeit imperfect, mystery is sure to keep readers inching off their seats.
A forsaken family bound by grief still struggles to pick up the pieces 12 years after their mother’s death.
When famous author Gil Coleman sees “his dead wife standing on the pavement below” from a bookshop window in a small town on the southern coast of England, he follows her, but to no avail, and takes a near-fatal fall off a walkway on the beach. As soon as they hear word of his accident, Gil’s grown daughters, Nan and Flora, drop everything and return to their seaside family home in Spanish Green. Though her father’s health is dire, Flora, Gil’s youngest, can’t help but be consumed by the thought that her mother, Ingrid—who went missing and presumably drowned (though the body was never found) off the coast more than a decade ago—could be alive, wandering the streets of their town. British author Fuller’s second novel (Our Endless Numbered Days, 2015) is nimbly told from two alternating perspectives: Flora’s, as she re-evaluates the loose ends of her mother’s ambiguous disappearance; and Ingrid’s, through a series of candid letters she writes, but never delivers, to Gil in the month leading up to the day she vanishes. The most compelling parts of this novel unfold in Ingrid’s letters, in which she chronicles the dissolution of her 16-year marriage to Gil, beginning when they first meet in 1976: Gil is her alluring professor, they engage in a furtive love affair, and fall into a hasty union precipitated by an unexpected pregnancy; Gil gains literary fame, and Ingrid is left to tackle motherhood alone (including two miscarriages); and it all bitterly culminates in the discovery of an irrevocable betrayal. Unbeknownst to Gil and his daughters, these letters remain hidden, neglected, in troves of books throughout the house, and the truth lies seductively within reach. Fuller’s tale is eloquent, harrowing, and raw, but it’s often muddled by tired, cloying dialogue. And whereas Ingrid shines as a protagonist at large, the supporting characters are lacking in depth.
Simmering with tension, this tragic, albeit imperfect, mystery is sure to keep readers inching off their seats.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-941040-51-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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