Black Diamond Fall

August 6, 2018
On a cold winter evening in Carleton, Vt., the principal setting of this nuanced literary mystery from Olshan (Cloudland), college student Luc Flanders vanishes after playing a game of pickup hockey with his roommates. That same evening the farmhouse that once belonged to the poet Robert Frost is vandalized. Det. Nick Jenkins of the Carleton police and his colleague Helen Kennedy investigate both crimes. They interview everyone in Luc’s life: his family, friends, casual acquaintances, and his lovers—both past and present. Everyone has reasons to lie about their feelings for Luc and their exact whereabouts on the day he disappeared. When Nick and Helen uncover one untruth after another, they return to confront the suspects; and slowly, inexorably a version of the truth about Luc’s life emerges, and in a sense, his life defines the lives of those closest to him. Readers will enjoy following the detectives as they uncover a link between the two crimes, but the real core of the book concerns the lies people tell each other and themselves.

Starred review from September 15, 2018
Here's another stunning literary thriller set in rural Vermont (following Cloudland?, 2012) from critically acclaimed author Olshan, this one clearly demonstrating his mastery of the character-driven crime novel. The characters are so carefully defined that readers feel their presence deeply; sometimes it's the same lurking presence that the young Middlebury College student Luc Flanders feels in the opening pages, but, later, after Luc disappears following a pond hockey game, there is the deceptive and despairing presence of Luc's family and friends. As a determined police detective attempts to figure out what happened to Luc, we gradually learn more about the student and those around him, including the fact that he had been having a secret relationship with an older man, Sam Solomon, a poignant figure who emerges, along with Luc's mother, Eleanor, as a fully developed, multifaceted character. The cold and snow are also a continuing presence?unrelenting and threatening to further obliterate the truth. Olshan sets his novel in the present, allowing for the extensive cellphone and social-media activity that are crucial in solving the crime, but it is based on two historical events, the 1971 disappearance of a Middlebury College student and the 2007 vandalism of the Robert Frost Homestead in nearby Ripton. As much an engrossing and rich examination of the consequences of desire as it is a painstakingly and sublimely constructed mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)