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Library | Material Type | Call Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
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Searching... Branch | Book on Tape | BT M HIGHTOWER | 1 | Audio-visual Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... Central | Book on Tape | CAS M HIGHTOWER L. | 1 | Audio-visual Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
Beaufort, South Carolina is home to the Smallwoods, a family closely knit but fiercely at odds. Georgie, the youngest, is tormented by worry for her son, who vanished two years earlier, and by her anger at her father. An unforgiving patriarch and ex-Marine, Georgie's father neglects her mother, belittles her brother Ashby, and denies her sister Claire the financial support she needs after a trying divorce. When their mother dies suddenly and Georgie's son returns home on the same day, tensions rise between the siblings, and Georgie begins to suspect their father had a role in both their mother's death and her son's disappearance.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shamus Award-winning novelist Hightower temporarily abandons her series featuring Cincinnati single-mom PI, Sonora Blair (The Debt Collector, etc.), setting her latest in the picturesque town of Beaufort in the South Carolina low country. Narrated in the first person by 34-year-old unwed mother Georgie Smallwood, the oldest of three children of former Marine drill instructor Fielding Smallwood, this intensely involving study of family dysfunction examines the fallout of suppressed violence and the sins of the past. Confronted with the suspicious suicide of their mother, Georgie, her divorced sister, Claire, and their gay brother, Ashby, rendezvous at night over a couple of beers in their traditional meeting place, the Hunting Island lighthouse, and then at a bar. After their father is found dead from a fall down the lighthouse stairs the following morning, Claire is arrested on the testimony of a waitress who overheard her confess that she'd like to push him to his death. Lurking in the family's history is the Hardigree Incident (mirroring the real-life Ribbon Creek Incident), a 1956 scandal involving the forced night-march of a platoon of Parris Island, S.C., Marine recruits which resulted in the deaths of seven men. Fielding, the officer in charge of the camp at the time, is absolved of blame, but retires under a cloud. After his death, the matter surfaces again. Could someone from the camp have been blackmailing him? Hightower's labyrinthine narrative is overburdened with superfluous plot twists and characters, and the denouement, which comes almost as an afterthought, strains credibility. Still, the novel is distinguished by its driving prose, lyricism and psychological nuance. Agent, Aaron Priest. Author tour. (July 2) Forecast: Will fans of PI Sonora Blair pony up for this more literary outing? Chances are many will, but this probably won't be a breakout book for Hightower. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In this novel of psychological suspense, furniture restorer and antiques dealer Georgie Smallwood believes that her overbearing father, Fielding, was responsible for her mother's mysterious death. But when Fielding is murdered, it is Georgie and her two siblings, Ashby and Claire, who come under suspicion. Then the fragile Claire is arrested for the murder, and Georgie struggles to save her sister by making sense of the family's troubled past, including a scandal involving her father's career in the marines. Hightower fills the story with plot twists that will appeal to thriller fans, but the novel, steeped in the feel of small-town South, also offers an introspective look at a woman's life, her personal relationships, and her sense of family loyalty. Georgie seeks to solve the mystery of her father's murder, but she is equally driven to learn if her father ever really loved her. --Sue O'Brien
Kirkus Review
A mother's apparently decorous passing is only the opening act in a South Carolina family's dance with violent death. Georgie Smallwood has never liked her father, and who can blame her? Fielding Smallwood was a drill sergeant who retired from the Marines after he failed to prevent a sadistic colleague from ordering a training exercise that left seven enlisted men dead. Since moving his family to the little town of Beaufort, he's made no secret of his affair with welcoming widow Carla Blanchard. As his wife Lena lies dying, ex-Sgt. Smallwood, bullheaded as ever, blames single mom Georgie for her mother's decline, takes Lena off life-support, and vetoes an autopsy that would determine the cause of death. But it's not until the miraculous return the same day of her son Hank, who ran away two years ago, that Georgie realizes just how badly her life has been blighted by her father--who, having demanded that Hank stay away when he phoned home shortly after going AWOL, now responds to Georgie's accusation that he's broken up her family by punching her out. When she joins her older brother Ashby, a gay, dyslexic shrimper, and her younger sister Claire, a newly divorced mother of three, in drowning their sorrows at an off-limits lighthouse and a downtown bar, Claire announces that she's ready to toss Fielding Smallwood down the lighthouse stairs. Naturally, the hated father promptly turns up dead at the bottom of those stairs; local lawmen of every stripe, from fatherly police chief Johnny Selby to Fielding's conniving buddy, ADA Eugene Wilbanks, get a lot more interested in the family's dirty linen; and things rapidly go from bad to much, much worse. The story hurtles along as rapidly as any of Hightower's police procedurals or thrillers (The Debt Collector, 2000, etc.) but finds room for a world of family pain and southern warmth. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Georgie is angry enough that her difficult father was involved in a scandal that has hurt the entire family, but now she suspects that he is implicated in her mother's death. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.