In this tightly coiled, intellectual drama, Cook (The Chatham School Affair) unwinds a marvelously tense story of belated redemption. While in St. Louis for a book tour, Luke Page, a middle-aged writer of lackluster histories, agrees to meet with a long-forgotten acquaintance, the "little hayseed tramp" he believes triggered a bloody tragedy that befell his family decades earlier. The story alternates between Luke's recollections of his hometown; the "heady ambition" of the despicably cruel, contemptuous younger Luke, who wants to go to Harvard and gets swept up "in the lethal tide of [his] own grand dream"; and the numb, disillusioned academic who sits down for a drink with Lola Faye Gilroy. A vertiginous precipice eventually materializes in front of Luke, who must finally confront the true nature of his father's heinous murder and its equally tragic aftermath. The younger Luke is without a doubt one of the more convincing modern villains, a single-minded overachiever devoured by raging oedipal loathing and equally consumed by narcissistic ambition. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Another of Cook's retrospective strolls down Murder Lane begins with an apparently chance encounter at a typically dreary book signing.Twenty years after escaping his family's home and the convenience store in Glenville, Ala., Prof. Martin Lucas Paige looks back on a life that's brought him moderate professional success as a Harvard-trained historian but not a single enduring human relationship. He abandoned his high-school sweetheart Roxanne because she was too ordinary for the grand future he envisioned; his wife Julia divorced him when she realized that he'd always be a stranger to her; and his parents died years ago, his father shot to death, his mother felled by a wasting illness soon thereafter. Now Luke's past confronts him with a jolt in the person of Lola Faye Gilroy, the store clerk whose estranged husband Woody, maddened by her affair with Luke's father, had killed Doug Paige. At first baffled and affronted by Lola Faye's request that he sign a copy of his new book for her (what should he write? he wonders: "Nice seeing you in Saint Louis"?), Luke joins her for a drink that turns into an endless colloquy, an insinuating interrogation by his late father's mistress that reveals layers of illusion and self-deception and ends by turning his world upside-down by forcing him to acknowledge just how high-priced his Harvard degree was.An improbable tale slow to gather momentum, but darkly powerful in the enda welcome recovery from the obscurantism of The Fate of Katherine Carr (2009).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

While on a book promotion tour in St. Louis, history professor Lucas (Luke) Page has managed to unload a single autographed copy of his latest tome onto a rather dowdy but delightfully irrepressible older woman who introduces herself as Lola Faye Gilroy. She's the woman he's regarded for years as the reason for his father's murder decades before in the small town of Glenville, AL. Her appearance opens the floodgates of memory as surely as if she were Proust's madeleine. The remainder of the novel is the extended conversation between the two, fueled (for him) by glasses of pinot noir and (for her) by appletinis with occasional forays into calamari ("it's like a cross between a French fry and a rubber band"). During the evening, she develops a taste for both as the pair unearth the sins, lies, blindness, and odd murders that have brought them to where they are. Verdict Edgar and Barry Award winner Cook (The Chatham School Affair, Red Leaves) has described himself as "one of the best-known unknown writers"; with his latest he'll likely retain his title for, in this genre-driven world, mystery fans will find him discursive, while he may well be overlooked by his real audience, fans of quirky small-town fiction of the type written by Richard Russo. However, those seeking a good, old-fashioned, character-driven storyteller who offers something to mull over would do well to seek out Cook on his next book tour.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.