SUMMERTIME

Estranged daughter returns home to bury her father and faces a pack of morbid memories, along with a middling murder mystery.

High-powered New York investment banker Lucy Schaffer flies warily back to her childhood home in northern California upon learning that her father Eric, a professor of geology and Russian émigré, has drowned. It’s only after she arrives that Lucy learns it was likely murder. Moreover, for a while, she seems to be a suspect. Her evasiveness regarding her whereabouts on the weekend her father died doesn’t help matters. (Lucy claims to have been holed up in her apartment the entire time, while in reality she shared a romantic California getaway with her married lover Kent.) She parries intermittently with a couple of intrusive police detectives, as well as sister Julie and cousin Sasha and older Russian relatives. Lucy’s young life was a series of losses: her baby brother Nicky drowned in the ocean just as Eric did, triggering madness in her mother; a childhood friend died in a tragic accident; teenage boyfriend Robert survived a near-fatal car crash, then broke up with her; Lucy’s infant son Stevie died of SIDS, leading to the collapse of her marriage to stolid Scott, Eric’s surprising choice for executor of his estate; and mother’s chilling favorite story, told frequently to the young Lucy, relates the mysterious death of her own baby brother, while she (just a girl herself) and the family rode a Russian train. One minute, the baby was incurring the wrath of passengers with his relentless screaming; the next, he’s dead. Lucy grapples with all of these ghosts and, in the process, seeks the truth about her father’s death.

Plot goes round and round without much forward movement. Much rests on Lucy’s precarious likability and the questionable power of her first-person narrative.