Book Reviews
Marcella appears to have wandered in from a Sidney Sheldon novel. Longhaired, exotic, lonely and well toned, she calls people "darling".... LeCraw moves the story along at a nice clip, unpacking scenes and returning to them from different perspectives.... The trouble is that everyone is so floridly earnest. I understand that this is a bodice-ripper couched as a literary novel...[b]ut does it have to take itself so seriously?
Chelsea Cain - New York Times Book Review
Strong writing keeps the reader sucked in to LeCraw's painful family drama debut. The lovely Marcella is reeling from tragedy; her ex-husband, Anthony, has sent Toni, their only daughter, away to boarding school and on to college. The man with whom Marcella had an affair, Cecil McClatchey, dies in a car accident soon after his wife, Betsy, is murdered. Amid the wreckage is Cecil's daughter, Callie, fighting for her sanity with two young children, and his son, Jed, who, desperate to fill the void left by the death of his parents, seeks answers from Marcella only to begin a tortured love affair with her as she drowns in guilt, struggling to find some meaning to hold on to. As Marcella comes closer to the truth about Betsy's murder and Cecil's death, and mindful that she is now the lover of Cecil's son, she struggles and fails to gather strength enough to make any decision, right or wrong. It is a story of deep and searing love, between siblings and lovers, but most powerfully, between parents and their children.
Publishers Weekly
LeCraw's thoughtful debut novel tells of two families whose lives are entwined by tragedy, secrecy, and scandal. Marcella Atkinson's heart was broken the night her affair with Cecil McClatchey ended and his wife was murdered. Never entirely cleared as a suspect in her killing, Cecil himself died soon after. Years later, her own marriage destroyed by the affair, Marcella is again thrown into contact with the McClatchey family when her daughter Toni (ignorant of her mother's adultery) is employed by Cecil's daughter, Callie, who for her own reasons must seek solace with her brother Jed in their family's summer home on Cape Cod. Jed's discovery of Marcella's old swimsuit in a closet leads him to her and to an entirely new relationship. Verdict:This exceptionally complex and accomplished novel does not read like the work of a beginning writer. With a strong underlying theme of longing woven throughout, LeCraw's work skillfully takes these characters through varying emotional journeys. An insightful piece, not just for beach or airplane reading. An author to watch. —Julie Kane, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., VA
Library Journal
However implausible, LeCraw’s serpentine debut mystery offers a searing blend of intrigue and desire. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
LeCraw's remarkably confident first novel begins seven years after an unsolved murder and explores the ripple effect both of decisions that may have caused the murder and its aftermath. Cecil McClatchy was away on a business trip when his wife Betsy was murdered in their Atlanta home, but he was clearly a suspect. Months later Cecil died in a car accident and the case has never been solved. Now Cecil's grown children are spending the summer at the McClatchy summer place on Cape Cod. Daughter Callie has chosen to recover there after the difficult birth of her second child. Callie's brother Jed has taken a leave from his legal career to stay with her since her husband can only commute from his own career on weekends-an example of LeCraw's sometimes unconvincing plotting. In the attic Jed finds a bathing suit he knows was not his mother's but belonged to a Cape neighbor, Marcella Atkinson, on whom he once had an adolescent crush and whose college-age daughter Toni is currently working for Callie as a nanny. Soon Jed is at her doorstep in Connecticut asking why the bathing suit turned up at his house. Marcella, long divorced from her seemingly aloof husband Anthony, confesses that she and Cecil had an affair, that she knows he was innocent of murder because they were together. In fact that very weekend Cecil had told her his decision to stay in his marriage; after Betsy's death, he made Marcella promise not to acknowledge the affair to protect his children from further pain. Soon Jed and Marcella begin their own secret affair complicated by Toni's obvious crush on Jed. Meanwhile Callie sinks into dangerous postpartum depression exacerbated by unresolved grief over the loss of her parents. Every character feels guilt or at least regret, some with more reason than others. Whether open or suppressed, passion rules events, but this is not a murder mystery; instead LeCraw reveals the complex moral and psychological mystery within all relationships.
Kirkus Reviews