Customer Reviews

The Point of Fracture

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"The Point of Fracture" by Frank Turner Hollon is a smart book that happens to be a mystery. It can even be called a literary thriller. Its action and characters drew me in almost immediately, and I could hardly bear to set it down.

Michael Brace is 37 and lives in South Alabama with his gorgeous wife, Suzanne. The two share a bad, sad marriage. But to everyone who knows them, they seem perfect together. They are almost too good at acting happily married. Michael's kind of lazy and unmotivated. Suzanne has a lot of issues, including frequent, debilitating headaches that may be driven by the emotional pain from her father's abuse. But she is seeing a psychiatrist. So she's trying to get help, right? Then the lies begin. Suzanne is not a woman you will soon forget.

This is kind of an anti-love story. We see a crime from the first spark of an idea in the murderer's mind through its planning and step-by-step execution and then through the trial that follows. The meticulous murder is almost elegant in its completeness.

The book is insightful and eloquently written: "He thought, the souls of men are touched by different hands. They were meant to be strange to one another. It is this strangeness that can sometimes bring us together, at certain times, in certain places, for a certain purpose."

There are layers in the well-structured plot. It's very gripping, with no comic relief. The drama features a murder trial with a twist -- well, a couple of twists. It reminds me of a "Columbo" mystery in that we the "audience" know who did what and get to watch it unfold, but we're the only ones who know. It builds in intensity, and once it gets going, it's relentless. When you see where the book is taking you, it's all you can do to fasten your seat belts and hang on for the ride, and I doubt you'll see where it's going to end before the ride is over. And I won't even give you a HINT as to how it ends.

I'm really not sure where to begin with THE POINT OF FRACTURE by Frank Turner Hollon, or even what to tell you. It is extremely well-written --- so well-written in fact that I had to basically set aside all of my other reading for a day or so because its prose was still echoing around in my head. It is also profoundly unsettling, not in an in-your-face manner but similar to what James Tiptree, Jr. so famously described as a pretty pink birthday cake with a razor blade inside.

The source of the unsettlement here is its characters, who are so true-to-life as to be painful. There's Michael Brace, a not-quite functioning alcoholic who lives in the shadow of his fabulously successful older brother Phillip and who is entangled in a strange, loveless marriage with the beautiful Suzanne. Suzanne is both truly mad and brilliantly mad, and she is also very angry; we never learn exactly why she is so angry, but the depth and extent of her insanity is slowly revealed during the first half of the book. Suzanne may be possessed of heartstopping beauty but her scars run deep below her surface. When she exacts revenge on those around her --- revenge against disappointment, perhaps, or their failure to make things better for her --- the repercussions echo and resonate far from Suzanne's epicenter.

We know from the first paragraph of THE POINT OF FRACTURE that all is not well, when we find out that Michael and Suzanne sleep apart as a matter of constant practice. As we learn more --- that Suzanne has severe headaches, and Michael spends A LOT of time drinking and fishing, watching television, and other such pursuits with friends he has known since childhood --- the elements of a disaster waiting to happen coalesce. Suzanne is a master manipulator, and is especially adept at using her beauty and dormant sensuality with a cold, detached and sinister twist. Her plan, even when it passes out of her control, unfolds perfectly, almost to the end. One element that she could not have anticipated changes the outcome of everything; yet one cannot walk away from this novel without feeling that Suzanne's plan may have been successfully carried through.

Frank Turner Hollon is not a household name as yet, though THE POINT OF FRACTURE may well change that for him. This is a work to be read, explored, and experienced repeatedly. Very highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Absolutely flawless in every regard. Frank Turner Hollon knows the legal system like nobody's business and the plot of this book is to-the-bone good. Even the throw-aways are worth the price of admission: The Driver's Education scam is priceless and the little details just shine. His best yet, and that's saying a lot. This guy should be rich with this kind of talent.

Frank Turner Hollon's "The Point of Fracture" epitomizes the taut psychological thriller at its best. My adrenaline glands started pumping early on in the novel and the flow didn't let up until I reached the conclusion. I was absolutely riveted by this beautifully written, fast-paced, unputdownable new release by the author of "The God File" and "A Thin Difference."

Michael and Suzanne Brace have been married for fifteen years. When the story opens Michael has been sleeping on the couch for a very long time - he prefers it to the guest room. A childless couple, the Braces have become strangers to one another, although he holds dear the memory of the young woman he fell in love with. He clearly retains the image of the girl who drove around with him one night in his "blue Volkswagon bug, until the sun came up, completely naked, drinking beer and laughing out loud." And he still believes she exists somewhere inside Suzanne. The reader will learn otherwise.

Michael considers himself to be an artist, a writer, and has long believed he has a great novel inside him just waiting to be born. The son of a wealthy family in Fairhope, Alabama, he had the independent means to take the time to test his theory of creativity. A forty hour work week was of no immediate concern. As years passed, however, he became less sure that "he could write a decent sentence, much less a novel." Bourbon became a short term solution for writer's block. Now the money situation is getting tight as his savings dwindles. But he finally has something solid. He has written four chapters of what he knows is an exceptionally good narrative. And this is a story he feels compelled to write.

Suzanne, still beautiful, suffers from debilitating headaches which leave her temporarily incapacitated. She is also terribly disturbed by childhood memories of violence and abuse. The upside of her physical pain is that it distracts from the emotional pain which is even more crippling. When Suzanne stumbles upon her husband's manuscript and finds that she is the subject of the novel, that Michael has written about dark events she has never discussed with him or anyone else, she feels the rush of a lifetime's rage. And she seeks vicious revenge, conjuring up and carrying out the perfect crime.

From the meticulous planning stages of the deed, to its execution, the investigation and the final drama played out in a court of law, this is a page-turner that will disturb and even shock. The prose is vivid and stark, the narrative tight, the characters, major and minor, are complex and well drawn. Hollon builds tension like few other writers. This one is dark and edgy and fine! "The Point of Fracture" is the first novel I have read by the author, but I certainly intend to remedy that now. Very highly recommended!
JANA

Hollon sets up the scenario of this psychological thriller with attention to the small details of a perfect crime, carefully measuring his characters' actions and reactions in a profoundly disturbing manner. As well the author knows, the novel is unsettling, Michael Brace and his wife, Suzanne, locked in a passionless embrace, Michael hoping for new beginnings, Suzanne trapped by her own imagination. On the surface they are a perfect couple, the beautiful wife with a writer husband from a wealthy and successful local family in Fairhope, Alabama. But in reality they've been drifting apart for a long time, the sweet exuberance of their early romance trickling into memory, replaced with a woman plagued by headaches who sleeps alone, her husband relegated to the living room couch in lieu of the spare bedroom.

Michael's life has been spiraling downwards for a few years, his fifteen year marriage to Suzanne only highlighting the unhappiness that has begun to fill his waking moments. Almost out of money, Michael will either have to ask his parents for a loan or get a job, neither prospect particularly desirable. Michael has been writing a novel, unaware that Suzanne has read every page, overwhelmed with rage that he should somehow intuit what she has never told anyone. Her background filled with the anxiety and distrust of alcoholism and mental illness, Suzanne has avoided any contact with her family of origin. Michael has accepted these terms, little realizing the turn his life will take while he stands idly by.

Hollon writes with a rich imagination of the impossible tension between a husband and wife locked into a marriage that has lost the shine of its early promise and settled into the stale rhythm of monotony. Except that in Michael and Suzanne's case, their marriage has deteriorated even farther, much closer to the edge of ruin than Michael anticipates. He has let himself believe in those early days with Suzanne, a time when she believed he would protect her from a past she couldn't bear to talk about. By the time Michael finds himself mired in an unimaginable quagmire, his normal consanguinity has turned to confusion, a man with no future questioning his past. This masterful drama catches the reader in a web of dark intrigue, turning one man's slightly unhappy world into an overnight horror story.

Beside his protagonists, Hollon has created a gallery of impressive eccentrics: the older neighbors who see everything that goes on; Michael's old friends, a hapless bunch of guys who cling to their carefree afternoons of drinking and fishing; Suzanne's therapist, a woman out of her depth and expertise; and the lonely misfit, Jerry Bannon, who wanders the empty pre-dawn streets collecting bits of trash in a plastic bag. Hollon is an aficionado of the human condition in all its intricacies and small betrayals. From disconnected spouses to taut courtroom drama, the pace of the novel is constant, a slow building toward the inevitable, a perfectly executed denouement. Although it reads like a thriller, this is no crime procedural, but a finely wrought tale of two people caught in a web of destruction. The author walks a fine line between a carefully plotted revenge and the redemption of a man who never asks much from the world until he loses everything, only to learn that "freedom is complete, or it isn't freedom at all." Luan Gaines/ 2005.

Frank Turner Hollon is the best in the business, bar none. A commanding, accomplished novel by an author everyone needs to discover.

I enjoyed this book very much and thought it was very well written. A couple of the characters and the events in their lives could have been better developed, but overall it was a good book.