This Never Happened

There's a bogeyman haunting the past childhoods of the Hayes siblings, and it falls to elder brother Richard, a reluctantly divorced Manhattan accountant and thwarted musician, to confront him in this skillful first novel of psychological suspense. Richard's fragile artist sister, Claire, has murdered her abusive husband (in a delusional state she imagined that he was her father), and family secrets start to leak, unveiling lots of unseemly parental behavior (sexual abuse, drinking, drugs, life-threatening violence--and that's just the tip of the iceberg). At the prodding of Claire's beleaguered lawyer and his own tough-but-maternal accounting partner, Richard must corroborate Claire's tale of childhood terror. Yet he can't face the notion that his father, a well-connected ob/gyn in the fictional town of Waterton, N.Y., and his mother, a chilly, pill-popping wino, were not honorable people. With suspense (and admirably restrained sex and gore), Summers leads narrator Richard on an excruciating journey--through a series of deft flashbacks and recovered memories--back to the family's weekend farmhouse-of-horrors upstate. Angry, defensive and often nasty, Richard isn't always attractive (he wonders what his beautiful love interest sees in him, and so do we), but Summers's portraits of him and Claire are sensitive and convincing. And while the parents are, by contrast, cartoon villains, their nastiness only sweetens the siblings' revenge. (Feb.)