Hildy Good has lived in the same small town on Boston's North Shore for all of her 60 years. She has a successful business selling real estate (though Sotheby's is gaining on her), she married and had two children with her college sweetheart (they divorced when he admitted he was gay), and she likes to drink (her children forced her to go to rehab). After rehab, Hildy started sneaking the occasional drink alone until one of her wealthy clients-a transplant from the city-turns into a drinking buddy, and Hildy becomes privy to a secret she may not be able to keep. A romance with an unlikely suitor and the possibility of the biggest sale of her career lessen Hildy's willpower. Then she must face the reality that her drinking may lead to her professional and personal ruin unless she confronts her addiction. VERDICT In Leary's third book (An Innocent, A Broad; Outtakes from a Marriage) the perils of addiction come to life. Sure to please fans of women's fiction featuring women of a certain age such as the novels of Jeanne Ray and Elizabeth Berg. [Leary is the wife of actor Denis Leary-Ed.]-Karen Core, Detroit P.L. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Wendover's top-flight real-estate agent, Hildy Good, was always the life of the party. Not only could she drink everyone under the table; she'd also capitalize on her heritage as the descendant of one of Salem's persecuted witches by performing convincing mind-reading tricks that wowed with their accuracy. While Hildy admits the mentalist bit is a sham, the drinking's the real thing, one that forces her family to stage an intervention that lands her in rehab. Alas, the treatment doesn't take. Once out, Hildy drinks alone and in secret, until newcomer Rebecca McAllister comes to town. A kindred spirit burdened by an unhappy marriage, Rebecca shares her wine and her secrets about her affair with local psychologist Peter Newbold, insidiously pulling Hildy into her Fatal Attraction-like obsession. As Hildy recoils from Rebecca's delusional fantasies, her drinking escalates to dangerous levels. Leary's powerfully perceptive and smartly nuanced portrait of the perils of alcoholism is enhanced by her spot-on depiction of staid New England village life and the redemption to be found in traditions and community.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

Hildy Good is a realtor in Wendover, the little Massachusetts town where she's lived her entire life. Smalltown life inevitably brings smalltown gossip, and Hildy is no exception: "I know pretty much everything that happens in this town. One way or another, it gets back to me." Suffering from alcoholism and marital problems, Hildy's always in search of distractions. Emboldened by a self-professed ability to read people-bordering on what she considers ESP-Hildy finds the intrigue she's been looking for when Boston hedge fund owner Brian McAllister and his wife, Rebecca, move to town. With her characteristic vigilance, Hildy soon uncovers a burgeoning affair between Rebecca and a local psychiatrist. As confidante, blackmailer, and real-estate broker to both Rebecca and Peter, the psychiatrist who rents the upstairs office, Hildy's entanglements not only threaten the lives of others but also tease out her own problems and self-delusions. In this second novel (after Outtakes from a Marriage), Leary creates a long-winded and melodramatic Peyton Place, but convincingly displays the corrosive and sometimes dire consequences of denial and overconfidence. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincot Massie McQuilkin. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

IN Wendover, Mass., a "regular" is a coffee with cream and two sugars. "Wicked" generally means "very." And the word "townie" is not an insult, but a badge of honor. Hildy Good, the 60-year-old heroine of Ann Leary's entertaining and resonant second novel, has lived in Wendover all her life. The fictional town on Boston's North Shore is an idyllic place, full of horse farms, rocky beaches and 100-year-old houses. Longtime residents have names like Barkie Stead and Sleepy Haskell. Hildy has been the town's most successful real estate agent for decades. She takes pride not only in selling her clients' houses, but in understanding their psychology: "Alcoholics, hoarders, binge eaters, addicts, sexual deviants, philanderers, depressives - you name it, I can see it all in the worn edges of their nests." In recent years, wealthy hedge funders have flocked to the area, seeking weekend retreats and driving up prices. They want charm and original detail, as well as every modern convenience. Or as Hildy puts it: "They want it old, but they want it new." Leary has a keen eye for New England class distinctions - for how outsiders romanticize the history of a place, even as their presence alters it. Some who grew up in Wendover can't afford to stay as adults. Local businesses have been replaced by national chains. Zoning laws mandate old-timey facades, which please the newcomers and amuse everyone else. (Hildy's ex-husband refers to the nearest grocery store as "the Stop & Shop of the Seven Gables.") Even Hildy's business is threatened, by her former assistant, now an agent at Sotheby's. Those who remember Wendover as it used to be are unsentimental. The closest Hildy herself comes to nostalgia is when she recalls sunny summer days on the ocean with a boy she once loved: "Every time I have a mole removed, I think of Manny's old lobster boat." "The Good House" has a plot packed with small-town intrigues: extramarital affairs, feuding mothers, a missing child and psychic powers that trace back to the Salem witch trials, to name a few. But the book's real strength lies in its evocation of Hildy's inner world. Almost two years after her daughters intervened and sent her to rehab, Hildy has been pretending to be sober. But she drinks at home alone, adhering to a set of rules meant to keep her under control: no using the phone, no driving, nothing other than wine. At first, you don't begrudge her a glass of red, or five, after a hard day's work. She enjoys it so much, after all. But it soon becomes apparent that Hildy is falling apart. Over time, she breaks every one of her own rules, with strange and sometimes disastrous consequences. When a friend tells her how she behaved while in a drunken blackout, Hildy thinks: "It's like a suctioning of the soul, being told the things your body does when your mind is in that dead zone. It's like having your very skin peeled off, like being publicly stripped down to some gruesome inner membrane that nobody should see, and revealing it to all. I never tell a person what they did when they were drunk. I would never do this." Leary writes with humor and insight, revealing both the pure pleasure of drinking and the lies and justifications of alcoholism, the warmth Hildy feels toward others when she drinks and the desperation that makes her put alcohol before the people she loves. The result is a layered and complex portrait of a woman struggling with addiction, in a town where no secret stays secret for long. J. Courtney Sullivan is the author of "Commencement" and "Maine." Her third novel, "The Engagements," will be published in June.

A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.). Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy's insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy's, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca's confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca's and Hildy's lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy. Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.