I enjoyed reading this book because of the curiosity for what will happen next, and also because it is written with tension and some suspense. On the other hand, I neither could relate to any of the characters nor to the plot. If there ever were a book with any characters more warped or a plot as disturbing, I haven’t read it, yet.

Still, this might be just what the author intended in the first place. I believe he wanted to write a twisted and complicated family drama with characters just as twisted and complicated. Then he wanted to analyze them, which he did very well.

In the story, Ben Blaine, a famed author who has been suffering from brain cancer, is dead by falling from a cliff. When his death is suspected as being a murder, his brother Jack, his older son Teddy, and even his mistress Clara who is expecting his baby become suspects.

The main character in the story is his younger son Adam Blaine, a CIA operative, who arrives from Afghanistan after the news of the death. An insignificant twist in the beginning of the story has to do with Adam hiding his CIA career from the Blaine family after staying away in Afghanistan for a decade.

Also, inside this perverse family drama is Ben’s wife Clarice, Teddy and Adam’s mother who has had an affair with Jack which Ben knew, but the whole family, including Jack, has kept living together in the family house in Martha’s Vineyard.

During the course of the story, other characters such as a reporter from the National Enquirer, the police detective, a policeman who is Adam’s old friend, and another young author Rachel, who for a short time becomes Adam’s lover, act as catalysts in the story. When Adam learns the terrible truths behind the well-kept family secrets as to who he is and why anyone behaved the way they behaved, he finds an alibi for each suspect to use in court and he is quite effective with it, despite his shock over his family.

Thrown in the mix is Ben’s will in which he leaves everything to his mistress Clara Pacelli, an actress with a collapsed career due to addiction. When Adam asks Clara to take a portion of the inheritance to avoid a court fight over it with his mother and Clara accepts his offer, Adam finds out that Clara is not the awful person his family made her out to be, and in the course of this and other events, Adam and Clara fall in love. The way they figure out how to live with this precarious situation and make peace--or not--with the Blaine family is for the reader to find out.

learning about writing with insight into human psychology even if the characters are warped and the situation is perverse.

the author's courage to pen this story.

the plot or the twisted characters.

is Richard North Patterson who gained fame with his thriller The Lasko Tangent in 1978. After that, he has written twenty plus novels, thrillers that mostly revolve around courtroom dramas. Among his novels are Degree of Guilt, The Final Judgment, Silent Witness, and Eclipse.

I think the writing is excellent; it holds the attention of the reader;it is published recently in 2014; it is a complicated, disturbing, yet a well-written literary novel.

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Created Jan 27, 2015 at 4:02pm • Submit your own review...