Brouwer's hero, Nick Barrett, is an amateur astronomer teaching at a junior college in Santa Fe. He receives an unsigned letter summoning him home to Charleston on the promise that the mystery of his mother's disappearance will at last be solved, not to mention the mystery of what really happened the night a teenage Nick was in an automobile accident. Years earlier, several of the oldest families of Charleston objected to the "white trash" Nick marrying one of their finest young debutantes. They settled an income on Nick and promised not to pursue a manslaughter charge for the young man killed in the car accident if Nick would agree to an annulment and leave town. Both events have angered and embittered Nick--turned him into an agnostic, in fact. In a search for the facts that is also a spiritual search, Nick discovers that the past he has accepted to be true is not the entire story. Unfortunately, the well-regarded Brouwer's usually fine sense of narrative seems strained here, and his denouement gathers all the principals in a set piece that seems dated, rather like an Agatha Christie drawing-room scene. Still, run-of-the-mill Brouwer is more interesting than many another writer's best effort, and several scenes--the attack of a rottweiler and a near-drowning--will leave you in a cold sweat.
Pages:
352 Format:
Hardcover EAN/ISBN:
0842342400 Publisher:
Tyndale House Publishers
