Three people remain broken and inextricably linked by a tragedy in the past that threatens to rise to the surface. Cale has changed his name and sells real estate in Hawaii, drinking to forget the past. His brother Ambrose remains in their childhood home, trying to be a good father, but always guarding their dark secret. And Lily has never escaped her dark past, though she drowns her numbness in work, always hoping that her missing brother will return. When a building development is proposed on the lake, their intertwining secrets and dark pasts rise to the surface again.

This book is a debut novel from Brendan Flaherty. It’s set in Connecticut in a small town where everyone knows everyone’s past, and the story shifts nicely between past and present, as the characters remember back to their past as teenagers in the town.

This book is chock full of tragedy and trauma. There is, in no order of preference, alcoholism, murder, suicides by horrible means, child abuse, domestic abuse, accidental death, violence, sexual abuse, child sex trafficking, bullying, pet deaths, a serial killer in the making… It’s a lot for a book that’s only 225 pages. At a certain point, the darkness feels melodramatic because it’s all dialed up to 11. Someone can’t just be a troubled teen acting out, they have to be an actual serial killer in the making. The only thing that can happen to our characters is the worst thing and all of them are numbing themselves and traumatized at all times. At one point I found myself thinking… there’s a kind of belligerent nature to the dark tone. Most people in the book are sullen, and then when someone around them asks for normal openness, they’re almost like “You want a normal conversation, here’s a hugely traumatizing story about something that happened to someone close to me. Happy now?”

So, be prepared for that.

I liked the way the author created a sense of place. The small town, the roads people take everyday, the way people know their way around the woods and the lake, everyone knows everyone. And I liked the way that there was this sense of family inheritance of traits. I feel like this comes up in books set in New England, in a way that I really like, where we are shown families that go back generations and they all share a known characteristic. All Rowe’s are bad news, for example. I felt like the characters were all well fleshed out and real enough that I wanted to see where it was all going. I also liked that Lily, Cale and Ambrose all worked in jobs to do with homes and housing: developing, real estate and construction. It was like they were linked in their preoccupation with home, but none of them could ever really be at home, because of what happened to them.

I liked the pacing and plot, mostly. I think the way it gave you the past woven into the present was really entertaining and kept me turning the pages, it was very smoothly done. The ending felt oddly soft though. We find out what happened, but other people in the book never do. Things that threaten to happen, don’t. People who want things just change their mind in the last chapters. It gave me an undecided and unfinished feeling. The whole build up of the book and the way the book is presented, just never plays out. It’s strange and unsatisfying. I wondered if it was meant to be meaningful or make a point, like in the real world things don’t always tie up neatly, but all the drama in the story is so dark and melodramatic that it needed a stronger ending that matched that.

I also want to know what Harvey knew and what he did, and where the body went, and also, why did Lily’s mother kill herself? We never find out.

On the whole, not a bad debut, just a bit uneven. I’ll be interested to see what this author does next.

Read It If: you like dark, violent, small town stories. There’s great atmosphere and an interesting story. It may be too dark or fall flat for some.

Thank you to PGC Books for the copy of this book for review.