But Matthew, who is as charming to everyone else as he is disdainful of Gil, is always one step ahead of him. “Nothing could change the boy’s true nature.”Ĭonvinced that Matthew had something to do with his parents’ deaths and that it’s his job to gather evidence, Gil begins to slide into paranoia and erratic behavior. Also, why is he always making secret phone calls out in the woods? The answer is as clear to Gil as the murderous glint he believes he sees in Matthew’s baleful eyes. Matthew is nice to the girls, polite to Gil’s wife and he’s also the welcome source of a $10,000-a-month caretaking allowance is flowing into Gil’s empty bank account.īut then Matthew produces his first short story for Gil’s fiction workshop at the local college: the eerie tale of a girl who seems uncannily like Gil’s daughter and dies by drowning. Nathan Oates’s A FLAW IN THE DESIGN (Random House, 304 pp., $28) is a slow-burn of a thriller, and it takes some time to figure out what is going on. Now Matthew’s very rich parents are dead - killed in a car accident in Manhattan - and Matthew, 17 and bristling with contempt, has come to live with Gil and his wife and two daughters in their modest house in Vermont. At least that’s what Gil Duggan, Matthew’s uncle, has always believed. Six years ago, when he was a creepy prepubescent kid with an explosive temper, Matthew Westfallen tried to drown one of his cousins. But wait until you get to the last section, a masterly piece of writing told from Dan’s increasingly muddled point of view. The book lags in the middle and, distractingly, switches to a no-quotation-mark style about halfway through. With Dan descending into the fog of Alzheimer’s, there’s a sense of urgency. Another section appears to be narrated by Jane herself. That, and the fact that his mistress soon moves into the family home.ĭelving into the emotional fallout of this damaged family, the book shifts back and forth in time and perspective and is partly narrated in the present by Philip Solomon, a novelist friend of one of Jane and Dan’s children. Suspicion falls immediately on Jane’s husband, Dan, a sharp-elbowed lawyer prone to spouting such unpleasant opinions as “I think all married men are a little unhappy, secretly, at least the ones who marry young.” The detective assigned to the case, Tom Glover, doesn’t buy Dan’s protestations of innocence: “There was something about Larkin’s performance - wooden, self-conscious, calculating, meticulous - that ignited Glover’s suspicion,” Landay writes.
What happened to Jane Larkin, a young suburban mother who vanished in 1975? Her haunting absence forms the center of William Landay’s ALL THAT IS MINE I CARRY WITH ME (Bantam, 320 pp., $28.99), a gripping if occasionally uneven psychological excavation of a family’s past.
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