A mother's worst nightmare threatens to become reality in Hepinstall's third novel. Unlike her first two Southern gothic creations (Absence of Nectar
and The House of Gentle Men), this haunting tale takes a more contemporary, less regional spin, trading folkloric poetry for a primal, metaphoric landscape. In clean, economical prose, Hepinstall examines how far an unstable mother will go in order to protect her child. After an explosion set off by a janitor with a grudge at her son Duncan's Ohio school kills one child and injures several others, Martha is terrified for his safety. She decides the only way to protect him is to run away to a remote cave on the Rio Grande. Her distraught husband, David, thinks she has lost all contact with reality and hires William Travis, a private investigator, to find her and bring her back for treatment. But he doesn't count on Martha falling in love with the detective, who calls himself Andrew. "I was trapped between two competing kinds of love, a river squeezed by its border countries," muses Martha as she struggles to keep her son safe in an unsafe world and fights her newfound desire. When David finally tracks them down and forces her to make a decision, Martha must confront the boundaries of reality and fantasy. The dreamlike setting enhances the psychological suspense in this taut tale of loss and discovery. (Jan.)
Forecast:Look for respectable sales and review attention, as Hepinstall's first two books were
Los Angeles Times bestsellers.
