Mortal Memory

Steve Farris believes he has recovered from discovering the bodies of his murdered family as a boy, but the author of a book on family killings proves that the case is still open. By the author of Evidence of Blood.

In Cook's 11th novel (among them Edgar nominees Blood Innocents and Sacrificial Ground ), the violence is all in the past (save for a car crash) but the level of terror is daunting. Fortyish narrator Steve Farris is an architect who lives with his wife and son in the suburbs. For him architecture "is a world which has no room for chance," but one that changes drastically when he is contacted by Rebecca Soltero, who wants to interview him for a book she's writing about men who murdered their families. For in 1959 Steve's father fatally shotgunned his wife and their teenage daughter and son, then vanished. Nine-year-old Stevie, desperately missing his gifted 16-year-old sister, managed to block out all thoughts about the deaths. Now Rebecca lures him into talking, and he is forced to acknowledge the questions that have haunted his subconscious mind: Did his father mean to kill him, too? What secret did his father and his sister share? The novel keeps shifting back and forth in time, from the present to "that last year" to the years before Steve's birth to the immediate aftermath of the deaths, but always comes back to the horrible deed--the excruciating how and the unanswerable why. The deceptively simple writing is harrowing as Steve allows his mind to probe more deeply, examining remembered looks, words and nuances. Terror builds and the ending to this chilling study in psychological suspense is a dizzying jolt.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

On November 19, 1959, William Patrick Farris, age 44, picked up a rifle, walked into his surly son Jamie's room and shot him, walked down the corridor and killed his much-loved daughter Laura, a pretty teenager, then tracked his wife Dottie as she ran frantically from room to room and murdered her as she cowered in the basement. He then got in his car and drove away, never to be seen again. Nine-year-old Stevie, playing at a friend's house, was the sole family member to escape the slaughter; and for over 30 years now he's been repressing the details of it, and the horror, as he's carved out a niche for himself in the architectural offices of Simpson and Lowe, gotten married, and himself become the father of a son who's now nine years old. At this point author Rebecca Soltero contacts him: his father's case is one of five she is including in her work on men who kill their families. In interview after interview, she and Stephen Farris piece together what his father did and why, and in each memory that surfaces, the present Farris family situation appears grimmer, darker, more troubled, inexorably leading to the dissolution of Stephen's family and his shattering search for and confrontation with his father in Spain. Cook (The City When it Rains, Evidence of Blood, etc.), often given to literary theatrics, here displays an impressive narrative simplicity and a therapist's insightfulness, producing a finely crafted psychological crime-fare. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.