Broken River by J. Robert Lennon

"A small house, in the woods, far from anything fun." When Karl and Eleanor uproot from Brooklyn for a fresh start in upstate New York, their new fixer-upper holds secrets too dark for any contractor to skim over. And for their twelve year old daughter Irina, neglected by her parents and possessed of a wild imagination, her dedication to secretly exploring an unsolved local homicide will have unspeakable consequences: the truth closer to home than even she can imagine.

Lennon, whose much-lauded Mailman in 2003 marked him out as a sharp observer of the simmering mania of small town America, switches mode here. Broken River is a psychological thriller but only in the way that, say, Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend is a murder mystery. Deliciously hard-boiled, it spins its complex, generation-spanning plot with cruel disregard for reader expectation or comfort. Spoiler alert: redemption, for a rich cast of characters dominated by the cruel and the broken, is not high on Lennon's priorities. Broken River builds dread from the off and deft viewpoint shifting brings events into often unbearable close-up.

"Bad things don't need reasons to happen," says one character near the book’s conclusion: an apposite thematic summary as aligning plot strands reveal the full horrors of past and present intersecting. Twenty years since his debut (the excellent The Light of the Falling Stars), Lennon’s continuing striving confirms him as a singular voice in contemporary American fiction.