Book Reviews
Part of a grand literary tradition… But literary overtones notwithstanding, Greene’s plot has the tight, relentless pacing of a fine detective novel… Deeply felt… and utterly absorbing.
Washington Post
A layered story of love, unbearable loss and grief.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Greene's deft and nimble hand make the story itself a guiltless pleasure to read.
Denver Post
What seems to be a deceptively simple story about the headmaster of a New England boarding school and his wife, facing late middle age and growing apart over a difference of opinion about their teenage son, morphed into a haunting, mysterious page-turner… A meditation on longing in all of life’s stages, a literary mystery, and a novel with much for book clubs to untangle.
Concord Monitor
A tightly woven, atmospheric thriller about a New England academic whose life goes off the rails.
People
Thomas Christopher Greene’s haunting tale tracks the unraveling of a marriage. It starts, eerily, with a naked man’s arrest in New York City’s Central Park, then twists back in time through love, grief, betrayal, and love again.
Good Housekeeping
Nothing is what it appears in this brilliant story of a life gone awry.... Arthur Winthrop, headmaster of the Vermont-based Lancaster School, is found wandering around naked in snow-covered Central Park in New York City.... [The story is] about the trajectory of Arthur’s inauspicious marriage.... [A]t its core, a trenchant examination of one family’s terrible loss and how the aftermath of tragedy can make or break a person’s soul.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Greene has created a brilliant, harrowing novel depicting the spectacular unraveling of a once distinguished and proudly successful man. He has also conceived one of the most convincingly drawn unreliable narrators that readers may ever meet, a character recalling the creations of Edgar Allan Poe… This is a riveting psychological novel about loss and the terrible mistakes and compromises one can make in love and marriage. Essential for fans of literary fiction.
Library Journal
Greene’s genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov’s classic, Lolita, and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn’s contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012). —Carol Haggas
Booklist
The first half of Greene's fourth novel unfolds like a conventional academic tale.... [But] the novel takes a wholly unexpected twist, which is then compounded by another, even more surprising one.... Although the puzzle element threatens to overwhelm the narrative, this is a moving testament to the vicissitudes of love and loss, regret and hope.
Kirkus Reviews