I’ll admit that I had high hopes for Bret Lott’s new “literary thriller” (as it’s being heavily marketed) but ultimately found that the novel fell short on both ends of that phrase. Here’s the start of my review today in the Washington Post:
[T]he book navigates its way uncertainly — here a murder mystery, there a late-blooming coming-of-age tale, suddenly a political thriller, intermittently a romance. The opening scenes — the discovery of the body and its immediate aftermath — stretch chapter by chapter for nearly half the book, slowed by digressions and explanations: why Huger calls his father Unc, how Huger and his mom came to live among the blue bloods, languorous descriptions of history and geography, plus a boatload of back story from Lott’s 1999 novel The Hunt Club (featuring these same characters). Only occasionally does the new book seem to remember the corpse, flashing images of “those teeth, that flesh, and whatever had happened — whatever had been done to — her face, and the glow and glisten of water runneling off a body.”
Check out the full review here. — Art Taylor