Masters of the House - Hardcover

Barnard, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684197286 ISBN 13: 9780684197289

Publisher: Scribner, 1994

Synopsis

After an unemployed man is incapacitated by his wife's death, his children, to avoid state care, take over the house and the housekeeping, but their charade is threatened by the discovery of the body of Dad's nosy ex-girlfriend in their own backyard.

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Reviews

Veteran Barnard (A Fatal Attachment), never a formulaic plotter, delivers a moving, low-keyed story set in the English city of Leeds in the late 1970s. After Ellen Heenan, mother of four, dies with her baby in childbirth, her unemployed husband Dermot collapses and the teenagers Matthew and Annie take over, driven by a desperate fear of being split up and "taken into care." The two tend to their helpless father in his upstairs bedroom, care for the younger boys and go to school-all the while hiding Dermot's breakdown fom the outside world. Weeks later, a new problem arises with the intrusive visits of Carmen O'Keefe, whose persistence confirms Matthew's suspicions of Dermot's infidelity. Upon the discovery of Carmen's body, knifed to death, on their doorstep one night, the two handle the crisis with their newly developed cool. Their secret upstairs is soon uncovered by Carmen's visiting Irish mother-in-law, who promply takes loving charge of the family and raises the children to adulthood. Not until then, despite Matthew's fitful investigative efforts, is Carmen's killer revealed in this affecting story whose gentle tone belies its chilling solution while paying homage to its gutsy young siblings.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The death of his wife in childbirth sends unemployed Dermot Heenan into such a tailspin--after a day muttering about how he's been justly punished, he retreats to silence and his bed--that his children are afraid he'll be institutionalized and they'll be parceled out to the tender mercies of Her Majesty's government. So the two eldest, Annie and Matthew, plot to keep Dermot's decline from the world by taking on the management of the house, their two younger brothers, and their incoherent father. All goes surprisingly well until Dermot's brassy ex-lover Carmen O'Keefe (no wonder he was repentant, reflects Matthew) comes around looking for him. After an initial skirmish, Matthew and Annie tell Carmen that Dermot doesn't want anything to do with her; but this tactic, so successful at first, doesn't prevent Carmen from turning up again in their garden, dead. The children have no energy to wonder whodunit; instead, they feverishly hide her body, scan the Leeds newspapers for headlines that never come, and pray that they've heard the last of Carmen--never suspecting that her mother-in-law, Connie, will soon follow her steps to their door. Connie's soothing advent, which at first seems to let all the tension out of the Heenans' story, ends by provoking as many surprises as you'd expect from the versatile Barnard (A Hovering of Vultures, 1993) in this memorably off-kilter tale. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Novel-a-year-Barnard nonetheless keeps coming up with new departures for himself. His latest is a mystery set within the confines of an ordinary family--ordinary until the mother dies in childbirth, leaving behind a distraught husband and four children, the oldest of whom, Annie and Matthew, must in effect run the household now. These two kids pretend to the outside world that life in their house is running smoothly despite their terrible loss--what the world doesn't know is that their father has come completely unglued. Further trouble starts when a woman comes knocking on their door, suspecting things are awry, and they fear they may be taken away from their father; then Annie and Matthew find this woman murdered in their garden, bury her, and wonder who done it. Who did do it turns out to be someone much closer to them than they could have expected. Brad Hooper

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684197286
• ISBN 13: 9780684197289
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224