A high-school teacher's course on evil through the ages bears unexpected present-day fruit. Before he shot himself and inflicted a head wound that turned him into a recluse, Jack Branch's father was a legendary teacher in Lakeland, Miss. To honor him and give something back to the community, Jack returns to Lakeland in 1954 to begin a stint in the classroom. There he designs a new course focusing on villains: Iago, Benedict Arnold, Jack the Ripper. Jack asks his students to each choose a subject for a report. Eddie Miller, a hitherto unremarkable student, wants to write a paper on his father, Luther Ray Miller, the so-called Coed Killer who abducted and murdered a Lakeland senior years earlier. Drawn for reasons he can scarcely explain to help the boy come to terms with his family demons, Jack is stunned when the boy's questions lead to Jack's own father, and ultimately to a catastrophe that Jack's narrative has been hinting at from the beginning. Cook, normally the master of the retrospective thriller (The Cloud of Unknowing, 2007, etc.), offers a case whose lack of tragic inevitability is only heightened by his insistence on heavy-handed Had-I-But-Known foreshadowing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Not a typical mystery, but typical Cook, this is a morality study, a tale of how one's good deed can have unintended consequences. In 1954, Jack Branch returns to his Mississippi Delta hometown to teach high school English, as his father had. Eddie, a student in his class on historical evil, is the son of a convicted murderer, and Jack encourages him to write about his father as a means of dealing with the pain. Eddie's classmates respond to his project in sometimes violent ways, and the lives of those around Jack and Eddie are burdened with tragedy even while Eddie uncovers his father's guilt. Through flashbacks and later trial excerpts, as Jack tells the story, Cook's formal, rather 19th-century style of writing gradually reveals how good intentions can reverberate even into evil. Cook won an Edgar Award for Best Novel (The Chatham School Affair) and has seven times been nominated for the award. His eloquent prose well conveys the stifling atmosphere of an insular, rural, Southern town in the 1950s. For public libraries' mystery and general fiction collections alike. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/08.]-Roland Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Edgar-winner Cook (Red Leaves) examines the slow collapse of a prominent Southern family in this magnificent tale of suspense set in 1954. Jack Branch, who's returned to his hometown of Lakeland, Miss., and taken a job at the same high school where his father once taught, is dismayed to learn that one of his students in his class on historical evil is the son of the town's infamous Coed Killer. Eddie Miller's father confessed to torturing and killing a local girl when Eddie was five, but died in jail before he could stand trial. Hoping to help Eddie step out of his father's shadow, Jack proposes that the boy write a research paper on the Coed Killer. Eddie is soon immersed in the project, which grows in scope until it encompasses the entire town's sordid past. When Jack's own father's history is brought into question, Jack realizes that he's started a fire he may be unable to control. Excerpts from transcripts of an old trial that slowly unfolds alongside Jack and Eddie's story heighten the drama. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

*Starred Review* Jack Branch, scion of a declining southern estate, comes home from college and, as an act of noblesse oblige, becomes a teacher at the public high school. His class, a classics-heavy exploration of the nature of evil, is over the heads of his students, so he kicks off each lecture with a sensational story from history. One student, Eddie Miller, has a sensational history of his own: his father was the locally notorious Coed Killer. Branch decides to mentor Eddie and, fatefully, encourages him to research his father's crime. Readers who enjoy watching good deeds get punished will be spectacularly rewarded as Branch's efforts go horribly awry in large part because Branch isn't the person he thought he was. The suspense builds slowly but inexorably, helped along with liberal doses of foreboding from Branch, the reminiscing narrator. And, in an ending with near-perfect resonance, we find that the story isn't really whose we've thought it was, either. Cook, an Edgar winner, is known as a crime writer, but his storytelling has grown better and better as his works have become less formulaic. Master of the Delta is a novel about character that just happens to be about crime.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2008 Booklist

#+ |9780061374043 |9780061374036 ~ A woman drowns in a pond, and her son is traumatized. SOME silences are caused not by the absence of sound but by sound suppressed, forbidden. These two types of muteness can have the same origin: the psyche, as Freud knew, can be more censorious than any tyrant. In Sadie Jones's first novel, "The Outcast" - set in a constricted London suburb during the late 1940s and the 1950s - the silences barely conceal the tumult. When Lewis Aldridge's father, Gilbert, comes home to Waterford from the war, he instructs his curious 7-year-old son to be quiet: a young child shouldn't be asking so many questions. But Lewis isn't the only one shushed in the interests of propriety. His beloved mother, Elizabeth, is also stifled; unable to adopt an appropriately ladylike, tight-lipped smile, she turns to drink. Even Gilbert finds himself clenching his jaw and submitting when his almost comically cruel boss casually insults him and his family. When Lewis is only 10, he suffers a stupefying trauma: taking a swim after a riverside picnic, his mother drowns, and Lewis is the sole witness. At the inquest, the boy just stutters when it's his turn to testify: "Tell me how it happened! Tell me! Lewis, tell me." "She sh- sh-" "Lewis, you need to try to explain to us what happened to your mother." "It's no good. Look at him." This exchange establishes a pattern of mute bewilderment overlapped with repression. To Gilbert, Lewis's mouth becomes a kind of wound, "open and ugly as if he couldn't close it." When living alone with his son becomes too painful to bear, Gilbert seeks solace with a new wife: a sweet but selfish young woman who isn't prepared to deal with Lewis's grief. Unlike Gilbert, "he didn't seem to want or need her." Lewis turns into a kind of ghost - a numb half person whose very presence upsets the town's phony politesse. Unable to speak much and finding no one to listen, he succumbs to a desperate, inarticulate anger that eventually gets him two years in prison for arson. Upon returning home, he realizes that Waterford represents just another kind of confinement. Only one person seems to understand him: Kit, the daughter of his father's boss and also an outsider. From an early age, she has idolized Lewis, so when he begins to self-destruct she blames the bullies instead of the victim. She suffers for it. Her father beats her; her coquettish and manipulative sister toys with Lewis for the thrill of it; her mother (who quietly endures her husband's abuse) maintains a frigid air of disapproval. But Kit's innocence and sensitivity are so ingrained that even her father's brutal blows can't extinguish them. BEFITTING a novel that explores the consequences of hypocrisy and silenced speech, "The Outcast" is written with economy. Jones's prose is plain, if sometimes mannered. And her influences are clear. "The weather made it look as if the broken buildings and people's coats and hats and the gray sky were all joined together in grayness except for the blowing autumn leaves, which were quite bright" sounds like the opening of Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms." Other passages recall Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and the movie "Far From Heaven." The novel even ends in a classic Hollywood cliché: a lover running after a departing train, breathlessly vowing, "I'll come and get you." And yet, although "The Outcast" doesn't feel original, it's consistently interesting. Jones's portrait of the claustrophobia and conformity of 1950s England is sharp and assured, a convincing illustration of the" dangerous consequences of a muzzled society. In prison, Lewis is convinced there is no place for him, that he is "wrecked." But when he returns to Waterford and tries to resume his life, he comes to realize that "all of the people who managed in the world" are also "wrecked people," that "everybody was in a broken, bad world that fitted them just right." Louisa Thomas has written for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and other publications.