High Water

Rating:
Summary: Wow. What a powerful book.
Review: I'm a big fan of the Sonora Blair books, and I live in Cincinnati where they are set, so I was doubly concerned that Lynn Hightower's newest book was not a Sonora Blair book.

Wow, were my socks knocked off by this book! A dysfunctional Southern family could be such a cliche or very trite, but Hightower pulls it off without going either way. Her characters have depth and humanity -- and you find yourself really rooting for them. Even when that means for them to do something really messed up <grin>.

High Water takes Hightower from a formidable mystery author to a serious character-driven author with a mystery involved (think James Lee Burke). If you're hesitant because you love the Blair books, go ahead and read High Water. If you haven't read any of Hightower's previous books, this one will hook you on her writing, and you can go back and read the Sonora Blair books.

Rating:
Summary: Just your typical Southern family intrigue?
Review: If this novel was intended to be a murder mystery, it surely took long enough to reach that point. For the most part, it was just mundane life of an unwed mother with a teenage son who ran away (for awhile), a sister living in a dream world, and a gay brother plus an abusive father who may have killed their mother for her money.

The plots came thick in a plodding way, hard to get through, with some unsavory characters with criminal pasts and suicide galore. This woman was as interested in getting involved with a strange stranger -- after all these years.

The only redeeming part of this sordid tale was finally learning who the father of her illegitimate son was, and why she had not married him. As in so many small towns of the South, the families get intermingled, as her lover's father had been her mother's lover. Read it to believe it.

The three siblings meet at an abandoned lighthouse which was in bad repair, as they had as youngsters. This book was loaded with beer talk and roughnecks at the local roadhouse where a nosey waitress heard something she should have ignored. Her interference cost this family almost all of the inheritance from the parents (both who died with days of each other under suspicious circumstances) and prompted the rejected brother to stage his own demise so they could use his life insurance.

The really 'bad' character had not died when he was supposed to, but it is his violent death at the end of the book which leaves the reader feeling she/he had been down among the lowlifes of this world.

Why she wrote this (unless it was biographical and she needed to get it out of her system) is beyond the realm of reasoning. I personally was glad to be rid of the whole affair.

This is as far from the scholarly writing of Beverly Swerling as you could possibly get. It is so mundane, dysfunctional, and modern in its subject matter.

Murder, unwed motherhood, gay brother, runaway son (shall I go on?) are just some of the sordidness in this account of an abusive father, unfaithful mother, and a lighthouse rendevous. The mother is found dead with a possible overdose of Xanax but has a mysterious bruise for which there is no plausible reason. Then the father is found dead in the abandoned, unsafe lighthouse where the siblings meet even after they are grown -- and grown apart.

The mother has inherited a fine home and money; the father is a banker. So, the rich don't exactly lead perfect lives or produce perfect children.

This story has little redeeming quality; instead of a 'good read' you come away feeling abused mentally. Miss Hightower may live in Tennessee, but thank goodness she bases it elsewhere. We don't have lighthouses in Tennessee, but family conflict galore, ending in murder. It's always been that way here.

Rating:
Summary: A refreshing twist on the genre
Review: Lynn Hightower has written a number of books of police / detective fiction. This book is a departure from that regime in that the protagonists are siblings who are suddenly confronted with the death, possibly murder, or their mother and father. This gives decidedly a different colour to the murder story. Interwoven with the mystery are the threads of the family dynamics between the siblings and that of the main character's runaway son.

In all, this is a well written book, and it fully kept my attention. I just wish Hightower had handled the ending slightly differently.