"In this tightly coiled, intellectual drama, Cook ("The Chatham
School Affair") unwinds a marvelously tense story of belated
redemption. While in St. Louis for a book tour, Luke Paige, a
middle-aged writer of lackluster histories, agrees to meet with a
long-forgotten acquaintance, the "little hayseed tramp" he believes
triggered a bloody tragedy that befell his family decades earlier.
The story alternates between Luke's recollections of his hometown;
the "heady ambition" of the despicably cruel, contemptuous younger
Luke, who wants to go to Harvard and gets swept up "in the lethal
tide of [his] own grand dream"; and the numb, disillusioned
academic who sits down for a drink with Lola Faye Gilroy. A
vertiginous precipice eventually materializes in front of Luke, who
must finally confront the true nature of his fathera (TM)s heinous
murder and its equally tragic aftermath. The younger Luke is
without a doubt one of the more convincing modern villains, a
single-minded overachiever devoured by raging oedipal loathing and
equally consumed by narcissistic ambition."
--Publishers Weekly, STARRED
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