Memory is powerful. Memory is treacherous. These are the twin horns of Linda Garbo's dilemma. Two years after finding Luci Cole's body, two years after her testimony helped convict Peter Garvey, Luci's lover, of murder, Linda is haunted by the fear that her remembrance of that fatal day was flawed. Linda had arrived in Linden Grove, a tiny Iowa town, to start her own graphic design business and to be close to Luci, an old friend from art school. But Luci's death sent Linda's life spinning into eerie tangents: she married Charlie, Luci's boyfriend, lived in the house Charlie built for Luci, kept Luci's workroom as a shrine to her. She is, she thinks, happy. But at what price has she bought that happiness?
As half-formed memories wash over her, Linda becomes determined to illuminate the context of Luci's death. Her decision, she knows, will disturb Charlie: "I wonder if I have set in motion a series of deceptions that will end with my losing him to Luci." Finding Luci's diary raises more questions than it answers, plunging Linda into a web of partial truths and outright deceptions that bind the small town together.
Howard's first novel is an elegant mystery in name and deed, unwinding, like Luci's loom, methodically back to origins and causes. It is also an equally elegant exploration of the ease with which such beginnings elude us. The novel calls into question the nature of individual and communal memory, of history as created art, of art as the transmission of desire. For Linda, the carefully etched image of the house she shares with Charlie (a birthday present, a gesture of apology for the turbulence her guilt has unleashed) is a metaphor for the dizzying coincidence of time, memory, and clarity: "If I can't bring life into the composition, I'm going to have to start over. Lower your brush, I tell myself, given a push by memory. Step up to the door full of sky, throw yourself onto the air. Suddenly I feel, rather than see, that the lines of the composition have gathered around this empty space all along, like rays of light. Lower your brush."
Howard has lowered her own brush--and raised the bar in the arena of smoothly crafted suspense prose. --Kelly Flynn
From Publishers Weekly
Don't expect the unexpected from this soap operatic suspense novel about a smalltown Iowa murder witness who marries the victim's bereaved lover. From the first page, when a puddle of spilled tomato juice reminds Linda Garbo of the day she discovered Luci Cole's slashed body, heavy foreshadowing and familiar themes choke this sultry drama. When Linda, a printmaker and graphic designer, first moves to Linden Grove, she stays with her old art school friend Luci and Luci's lover, beekeeper Charlie Carpenter. Luci's brutal murder soon after throws Linda and Charlie together, and a year later they marry. Two years after the trial, in which their neighbor Peter Garvey was convicted, Linda and Charlie are struggling to forget the horrible crime (difficult since they live in the house where the murder occurred). John Bender, a local reporter who believes in Garvey's innocence, persuades Linda to meet Garvey. The prisoner, who has previously admitted that he was Luci's spurned lover, tells Linda that Luci kept a secret journal. Although Charlie assures Linda that no diary exists, Linda finds her friend's writings in the margins of an art book. They detail Luci's self-destructive flirtations, including one with a religious counselor aroused by her confessions. Linda also uncovers the secrets of a troubled teenager, local drug traffickers, a blackmailer and, of course, her own husband. First-time novelist Howard nicely captures the essence of rural Iowa, the work of beekeeping and the art of etching. Dialogue between Linda and the reporter has an understated Midwestern charm. Unfortunately, Howard's evident determination to create a bestseller by cramming her novel full of daytime television concernsAdeep sexual psychology, childhood trauma, male villains and triumphant heroinesAproves as fatal and obvious as Luci's misguided affairs. Regional author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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