Fogland Point

Starred review from June 18, 2018
According to history professor David Hazard, the sly narrator of Burgess’s masterly first novel, nothing ever happens in Little Compton, R.I., his hometown, but he’s soon proved wrong after he sets out from Boston on receiving a garbled phone message from his Grandma Maggie claiming that she found
a body. David doubts there’s been a murder, but he fears that Maggie’s dementia is worsening. As he puts it, “in Maggie Hazard’s cockeyed world it could be high noon or three a.m., yesterday or 1957. Walking through the front door is like coming upon a play mid-scene.” When David arrives in Little Compton, he discovers Maggie’s best friend and next-door neighbor, Emma, is indeed lying dead on her kitchen floor. Was Emma murdered? Was Grandma remembering another incident? And who is wealthy Marcus Rhinegold, whose sudden appearance in town has started tongues wagging? In his search for answers, David stumbles on more family secrets than he could ever have imagined. Elegant prose, a veritable Chinese box of puzzles, and authentic, well-rounded characters make this a standout.

June 1, 2018
When his Rhode Island Catholic college realizes he's transgender, a history professor gets fired from his job just in time to respond to the grandmother who cried wolf once too often.Maggie Hazard's phoned her grandson so many times to report imagined emergencies that he lets her latest call go to voicemail. This time the message turns out to be about her discovery of a bloody corpse in the kitchen. After he finally listens to it, David Hazard, who's just been let go because a required medical form revealed his birth name as Rosalie, packs his overnight kit and heads for Little Compton, the end-of-the-line spit of New England shoreline where his widowed grandmother lives with encroaching dementia. She shows no more signs of wear and tear than usual, but Emma Godfrey, the next-door neighbor who lavished her with care, has been killed by a collision with a frying pan. It looks like an accident caused by the collapse of a shelf full of cookware in Emma's kitchen, but it's actually murder, announces Sheriff Billy Dyer. David's complicated relationship with Billy, who dated and proposed to him before he transitioned, guarantees some initial awkwardness, but soon the two are working together to figure out who killed Emma--and what happened to local celebrity Marcus Rhinegold, who disappeared aboard his yacht shortly after propositioning David and inadvertently revealing that he and his wife, Alicia, nee Crystal Gronkowski, were hiding from the murderous Molinari gang. Even though you'd think that nothing ever happens in Little Compton, David observes tellingly that "The secret to village life is concealment," and pretty much every single member of the cast turns out to be hiding some remarkably dirty laundry.Readers who can accept the wildly improbable explanation behind the carnival of crime in Little Compton will find Burgess' debut strongly evocative of a distinctive place, presented in a compelling first-person voice that manages to be beyond illusions but never cynical.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2018
The police chief's wife wears her gardening hat at Sunday services, hoping to conceal the bruises from the beating her husband gave her the previous night. Grandma, who lives alone in a big old house, wonders why Ronald Reagan stopped making movies. By now we've learned that these are the sorts of not-so-secret details of small-town life anywhere. But author Burgess digs deeper, giving us a beautifully written account of a world that stretches any definition of bizarre. Narrator David Hazard has returned to his fogbound New England village to care for Grandma and tend his own secret, which will stay secret here, just in time to encounter a murder. Grandma's pal, the octogenarian lady next door, has had her skull bashed in. Getting a grip on what happened means probing layers of betrayal as well as murder. Turns out the past half-century has been an elaborate smokescreen, a carefully orchestrated flimflam to cover up something that shouldn't have happened. Burgess handles the revelations with an effective mix of wry humor and tough-guy violence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)