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The Water's Lovely

The Water's Lovely

A stand-alone novel published by Hutchinson in


This stand-alone story … is one of her most gleefully energetic efforts. And its powers of description and characterization place it far beyond the limits of a genre novel. This book is less a conventional crime story than a sly social comedy in which not everybody dies of natural causes.

Janet Maslin 1

Weeks went by when Ismay never thought of it at all. Then something would bring it back, or it would return in a dream. The dream began in the same way. She and her mother would be climbing the stairs, following Heather’s lead through the bedroom to what was on the other side, not a bathroom in the dream but a chamber floored and walled in marble. In the middle of it was a glassy lake.

The white thing in the water floated towards her, its face submerged, and her mother said absurdly, “Don’t look!” The dead man was Ismay’s stepfather, Guy.

Notes

Contemporary Reads 2

Footnotes

  1. The New York Times, 2007 ↩︎

  2. Book links may earn this site a small commission. ↩︎