Chatham School Affair (Cook) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A seductive book ... the key to this mystery lies in the mind of the narrator. The pleasure is finding a new perspective to read that mind.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review


Like the best of his crime-writing colleagues, Cook uses the genre to open a window onto the human condition. In this literate, compelling novel, he observes the lives of people doomed to fates beyond their control and imagination. One character here comments: "If you look back on your life and ask, What did I do?, then it means that you didn't do anything." Elizabeth Channing is trying to change the path of her life as, in 1926, she arrives to teach art at a small boys' school located in the Cape Cod village of Chatham. Believing that "life is best lived at the edge of folly," she immediately enthralls the novel's narrator, Henry, the headmaster's son. But Elizabeth is drawn to a fellow teacher, Leland Reed, a freethinker who is unhappily married and has begun to have serious doubts about his life. The inevitable tragedy and its aftermath is narrated by a mature, melancholy Henry looking back at the strange, bleak fates of those involved. Cook is a marvelous stylist, gracing his prose with splendid observations about people and the lush, potentially lethal landscape surrounding them. Events accelerate with increasing force, but few readers will be prepared for the surprise that awaits at novel's end. Literary boundaries mean little to Cook; crime fiction is much the better for that.
Publishers Weekly


The destruction that passion can wreak is well demonstrated in this austere new novel by the author of Breakheart Hill. From the August day in 1926 that Elizabeth Channing comes to teach art at a private school outside Boston, Henry Griswald, son of the headmaster, finds himself a willing accomplice in the love affair between Channing and Leland Reed, a World War I veteran and fellow teacher. Now a bachelor in his seventies, Griswald looks back over a year in his adolescence that culminated in violent death and the destruction of innocent lives, a year that taught him the dangers of strong emotions. Although none of the characters except Henry is well developed, it's particularly difficult to understand what attraction the lovers have for each another. Cook effectively builds the tension through the use of foreshadowing. This well-written, genre-stretching mystery starts slowly and delivers a powerful ending. Appropriate for public libraries of all sizes. —Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Library Journal


This is a powerful, engaging, and deeply moving novel, highly recommended for all who enjoy well-crafted, genre-bending crime fiction. —George Needham
Booklist


From a celestial-seeming distance, Henry Griswald looks back on 1926-27, the year disaster overtook the Chatham School, where his mild, proper father served as headmaster until the events precipitated by the fatal arrival of art teacher Elizabeth Channing and English teacher Leland Reed. Henry remembers how he accepted Miss Channing's tutelage in drawing and helped Reed work on the boat he was building to sail away from Massachusetts, ignoring his family's orphaned boarder Sarah Doyle to fantasize instead about the free-spirited couple, and deploring the resistance of Reed's inconvenient wife and daughter. Pausing in his leisurely narrative to throw out hints of an impending calamity at Black Pond, recall his own testimony at Miss Channing's trial for murder, and observe the principals staggering under the weight of their past and future, Henry evokes by turns the lovers' stifled passion, his unreasoning hatred of his father and his determination to avoid growing up to be like him, and his crushing retrospective guilt at whatever it is that he has become. Readers who aren't exasperated by the glacial pace will find themselves entranced. Though Cook's story this time is less rich and resonant than Breakheart Hill (1995), reading it is like watching another avalanche in agonizing, exquisite slow-motion.
Kirkus Reviews