BENEATH CRUEL WATERS
Bassoff, Jon Blackstone Publishing (256 pp.) $27.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-79993-888-0
y o u n g a d u lt
Two violent deaths in the same spot 34 years apart bookend an American family horror story from the heartland. In 2018, Vivian Davidson returns to the ruin of the house in Thompsonville, Colorado, where she shot former lover Ruben Ray to death back in 1984, to hang herself. Why did she kill Ruben, and why did she wait so long after getting away with murder to kill herself? These are only the first of the many questions that torment Holt Davidson, the son who pulls himself away from his job as a firefighter in Topeka to come to her funeral after learning of his mother’s death from her best friend, police widow Joyce Brandt. It’s a small service, attended mostly by Pastor Boswell and Vivian’s fellow congregants from the First Lutheran Church. Vivian’s brother, musician Bobby Hartwick, isn’t there because he’s playing on the road somewhere, and Holt’s older sister, Ophelia Davidson, isn’t there because she’s staying in a halfway house after long years of institutionalization following a breakdown. Looking through his mother’s house in search of answers, Holt finds several things—a handgun, a Polaroid shot of the dead Ruben, an unsigned love letter—that raise even more questions, and he sets out in dogged pursuit of the truth. Each damning new confession he wrings from the people connected to the two fatalities attempts to paper over the even more shocking revelations to come, and each of these revelations brings new grief. No wonder Holt tells Joyce: “I should stop digging. Before it’s too late.” But it’s already too late. A powerful family melodrama drenched in sadness and guilt with hints of redemption.
JACKIE & ME
Bayard, Louis Algonquin (352 pp.) $27.95 | June 14, 2022 978-1-64375-035-4
Bayard imagines Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s momentous courtship through the eyes of Lem Billings, the future president’s lifelong best friend. Everyone knows how things turned out—every strand of Kennedy lore has been examined repeatedly. Bayard doesn’t change names or reveal new facts (and an author’s note pointedly acknowledges that he’s made up a plot point concerning Lem). Instead Bayard produces an “alternative history” evincing these very public figures’ inner lives while considering how different choices might have led to different outcomes. While Lem Billings was an actual Kennedy intimate, narrator Lem is reminiscent of The |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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1 march 2022
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7
