The Chatham School Affair

Listening to this intricately structured novel read by George Guidall is like hearing a demanding piece of music performed by a master. Guidall moves with assurance through continual shifts of time and place as the story of a small-town scandal emerges, not in sequence, but in layers. It's a tribute to both writer and performer that the listener is never disoriented. Guidall's fine performance draws attention to nuance and heightens the tension that develops as ever finer details are added to a picture whose outlines are clear from the beginning. J.N. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 29, 1996
Like the best of his crime-writing colleagues, Cook (Breakheart Hill) uses the genre to open a window onto the human condition. In this literate, compelling novel, he observes the lives of people doomed to fates beyond their control and imagination. One character here comments: "If you look back on your life and ask, What did I do?, then it means that you didn't do anything." Elizabeth Channing is trying to change the path of her life as, in 1926, she arrives to teach art at a small boys' school located in the Cape Cod village of Chatham. Believing that "life is best lived at the edge of folly," she immediately enthralls the novel's narrator, Henry, the headmaster's son. But Elizabeth is drawn to a fellow teacher, Leland Reed, a freethinker who is unhappily married and has begun to have serious doubts about his life. The inevitable tragedy and its aftermath is narrated by a mature, melancholy Henry looking back at the strange, bleak fates of those involved. Cook is a marvelous stylist, gracing his prose with splendid observations about people and the lush, potentially lethal landscape surrounding them. Events accelerate with increasing force, but few readers will be prepared for the surprise that awaits at novel's end. Literary boundaries mean little to Cook; crime fiction is much the better for that.