Thomas H. Cook

This is my first Thomas H. Cook novel; it will not be my last since this is among the best mysteries I have ever read.

The narrator is Samuel Madison, an English literature professor, whose wife Sandrine dies from an overdose. Sam is arrested on suspicion of murder and his trial forms the structure of the narrative. As the trial proceeds and witnesses testify, Sam begins a journey of self-discovery as he relives his life, especially relationship with his wife. “I’d come to feel that my show more thinking was growing deeper and more curiously seeded with poignant memories. One thing was certain, thing that once mattered no longer did and in their vanishing they’d created more space in my mind. It was strange that by radically confining my life, Sandrine’s death, along with its dire consequences, had in some way expanded my consideration of it.”

Sam’s flashbacks reveal the disintegration of his marriage. We learn that “’the core reason [Sandrine’d] loved her husband [was] . . . His kindness. . . . His goodness. His capacity to feel sympathy.’” Lately, however, Sandrine had become increasingly withdrawn and angry and frustrated with Sam: “she moved away from me, moved away from my trumpeted opinions, my sharpened sensibilities, my resentment of all that struck me as puerile.” In fact, the evening of her death, she called him a sociopath.

The book is a psychological character study. Sam emerges as not a particularly likeable character. It is difficult to see the man with whom Sandrine fell in love, the young man who was “without bitterness, harboring no resentments, working on a novel . . . about ‘the tenderness of things’.” When the novel opens, Sam is an arrogant intellectual snob. He shows little emotion except contempt; he makes sarcastic, judgmental comments about the people of the town in which he lives and the students at the college where he teaches. At different points he is described as “aloof” and “soulless” and incapable of sympathy. Sam even admits that he seems to be missing something in his character, and this observation reminds us of a conversation he’d had with Sandrine in which she wondered if an essential element of character “’could be gotten back’” if it went missing.

As a former teacher of English literature, I loved the many literary references in the book. For instance, allusions to Robert Frost’s poetry are made: Sam describes the college president as “young, with miles to go before he slept” and his own life as being numbed because of “the road not taken”. Sam’s thoughts and speech are full of literary references appropriate to a pedantic English professor.

Interest never lags. There is the mystery: Did Sandrine commit suicide or did Sam kill her? There is also the interest in learning how/why Sam changed so much. The reader’s emotions are engaged as his/her feelings for Sam change: just as some sympathy is felt for him, some ugly thought or action of his is revealed.

I highly recommend this book to people who enjoy mysteries but who want more than just suspense. The flyleaf describes the novel as a “literary mystery” and it is indeed that – in every sense of the word.

Please check out my reader's blog (http://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). show less

I love Thomas H. Cook. His books have made me gasp aloud and weep shamelessly. He is a master of bringing humanity to his characters and stories without turning them maudlin or hackneyed. Reading him is... intimate.

That being said, even though I rated this 4 stars, this is not the book to start with if you're just finding Cook. This book is lacking in some of the emotional depth of some of my favorites of his (the only thing I didn't really like about it). Furthermore, for the new Cook show more reader, this book could be off-putting because the characters in it are of a certain class: educated, well-off without having to work very hard, well-travelled... East Coast elites, I suppose you could say. They're not the typical sympathetic characters, and the way Cook delves into the theme of betrayal - by contrasting real-life devils against the little boys in the story playing at politics - is not as compelling as what some might be used to reading. So, if you're looking to read this and you haven't yet read Thomas H Cook - don't. Go read Red Leaves, The Cloud of Unknowing, Instruments of Night, and then decide if you want to read this.

And if you do want to read The Crime of Julian Wells ... good for you. It is smart, it is cosmopolitan, it takes in centuries of dark stories in less than 300 pages in a masterful way, and it is challenging. You will (most likely, unless you are better educated than many) learn things about Argentinian politics. You will expand your vocabulary. And if you are still when you read this, and sensitive to the ugly things gathering in the gloom around Phillip and Loretta, you will examine things about the human character you may have never contemplated before. Take a couple minutes to pause when Phillip realizes he may have worked to keep his "best friend" out of the spotlight due to his own jealousy; consider to whom in your life you're doing this right now.

The thing I like most about this book is probably actually also another deduction against it, because Cook doesn't spend enough time on it. Phillip finds it easy to forgive his friend for his crime, and wishes to have offered support to Julian when it would have made a difference. Yet how Phillip got here so quickly was probably worth examining a little more. We live in a time when people won't take responsibility for the things they should, and take more credit than they're due. Julian won't excuse himself for a young man's earnest mistake, and perhaps rightly so: it cost someone else everything. But Phillip's ability to not internalize it the same way Julian did (though he is more involved himself than he would have thought) and to place it properly in the perspective of Julian's life is beautiful, and what a true friend would do. I would have liked to have seen him move from the realization of what Julian did, and all the levels of all the reasons he did it, to his final words to his friend, with a little more than what we got on this.

Again, not something I would recommend to most, but I'm happy to have spent time with Cook again, and am antsy to get my hands on some other recent pieces of his I haven't picked up yet. show less

This is a wonderful book, a mystery with a hint of the supernatural, a story-within-a-story-within-a-story. George Gates, a travel writer on a trip up an unnamed tropical river, passes the time by regaling a fellow traveler with the story of an unsolved missing person and his own search for possible clues.

George, whose young son was abducted and murdered, has been reduced to writing obituaries and local news items for a small-town newspaper. His only hope is a futile one, that some day his show more son's unidentified murderer will be punished. Unable to sleep most nights, he frequently finds himself at a local bar, where one evening he is greeted by a retired missing person's detective who tells him of an old unsolved case. Unwillingly reeled in by the story, George, along with a dying progeria patient he has befriended, face their demons while trying to find an explanation for the disappearance in a handwritten story left by the missing woman - a tale of what appears to have been her own involvement with a man who may be able to "restore the balance" between good and evil. show less

Harvard educated historian Lucas Page has come to St. Louis to promote his latest book in front of a small group of "museum regulars," none of whom, as it turns out, have any interest in actually taking a copy of the book home with them. Just when he's ready to call it a night, Lucas is approached at his table by what he at first assumes is a homeless woman. But then he realizes that he is looking into the eyes of Lola Faye Gilroy, the very woman he still blames for his father's murder two show more decades earlier.

"She'd come to make her case before me, clarify the issue Woody Gilroy had raised in his suicide note, rid herself of the guilt he'd laid at her feet, revisit all that in a talk with me, then enter her plea at the end of it: not guilty."

Or had she?

Feeling a little as if he'd been tricked into it, Lucas finds himself agreeing to have a drink with Lola Faye so that they can have a talk about their lives in the aftermath of what happened all those years ago. Lucas, under the impression that Lola Faye is still the uneducated and naive small-town Alabama girl she was when his father hired her to clerk in the family variety store, figures that their conversation will be a short one. Just a quick drink, a little polite conversation, and Lola Faye will be out of his life again - exactly where she belongs.

But then Lola Faye starts asking questions, good ones. And those questions cause Lucas to rethink everything he was so certain that he knew about the night his father was shot to death in his own kitchen by someone lurking outside in the dark. Long before Lucas realizes it, Lola Faye has taken over the conversation and she's guiding it exactly where she wants it to end up.

"The last best hope of life is that at some point during living it, all that you did wrong will suddenly teach you to do right."

The Last Talk with Lola Faye is an intense novel, one in which the pressure is turned up so gradually that the reader ends up being lulled into the same false sense of complacency that Lucas experiences. As it became clearer and clearer that Lucas is correct in feeling threatened by where Lola Faye is leading the conversation, I couldn't turn pages fast enough. Even so, the book's ending is a completely satisfying one that I never saw coming. And that's a good thing.

This is my first experience with a Thomas H. Cook novel, and that strikes me as remarkable considering how much crime fiction I've read over the last several decades and that Cook has written something like three dozen novels. But that's kind of nice, really, because now I have Cook's huge back catalog to explore, including Red Leaves, the one I started a couple of days ago. show less