Two Days Gone

October 24, 2016
In this skillfully written thriller set in western Pennsylvania from Silvis (On Night’s Shore), Thomas Huston, a respected Shenango College professor and acclaimed author, appears to have murdered his wife, Claire, and their three children in their beds. Huston recently lost both his parents. Did he snap? Sgt. Ryan DeMarco, a state policeman and a friend of the suspect—who’s coping with his own personal tragedy—takes the case hoping to find some answers. On the Shenango campus, he meets a student, Nathan Briessen, who steers him to information about a novel that Huston was researching. Literary references to Nabokov and Poe, some meta-moments about characters and writers, fiction and truth, as well as DeMarco’s complicated relationship with his wife, Laraine, add seasoning to the plot. By alternating between Huston and DeMarco’s narratives, Silvis nimbly puzzles out what took place on the night of the multiple murders, and what it means to go on after a loss. Agent: Sandy Lu, L. Perkins Agency.

October 15, 2016
A Pennsylvania police officer digs deep, then still deeper, into the mystery of an inexplicably slaughtered family.Professor Thomas Huston seemed to have it all: a successful career as a novelist, a position as a popular teacher at Shenango College, a loving wife, and three children too young to have grown away from him yet. So why on earth would he have taken a razor to their throats before disappearing into the night? Why, even if he felt compelled to end their lives, would he have varied his technique for his baby son, stabbing him in the heart instead? And why, if he's so determined to run away, does he keep hovering around the town, telephoning his friends only to read them poems by Edgar Allan Poe? Sgt. Ryan DeMarco counts himself as one of those friends, but he finds Huston's behavior, whether or not he's as guilty as he looks, as inexplicable as everyone else. Unlike everyone else, however, DeMarco can't let go of these agonizing riddles. Still mourning the death of his own baby son in a car crash, he feels an uncanny kinship to Huston, an intimacy that deepens when he retraces the writer's steps to Whispers, the strip club where Huston had cultivated owner Bonnie Harris and dancer Danni Reynolds as models for Annabel, the heroine of his latest novel. As DeMarco, who's a lot better at butting heads with station commander Sgt. Kyle Bowen, the supervisor he used to supervise before his demotion, than at detective work, struggles to make sense of Huston's behavior, Silvis (The Boy Who Shoots Crows, 2011, etc.) intercuts his inquiries with glimpses into Huston's tantalizingly underspecified memories of the fatal night until the two men finally collide in the first of several memorable lurches into resolution. Beneath the momentum of the investigation lies a pervasive sadness that will stick with you long after you've turned the last page.

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Starred review from December 1, 2016

This novel revolves around two men with nothing in common: one a famous writer and professor, the other a disheartened detective. Yet, a bond is formed between the pair that will be stretched to the breaking point. Sgt. Ryan DeMarco arrives at a horrific crime scene--Thomas Huston's butchered wife and children. All signs point to the disappeared professor as the murderer. DeMarco cannot accept that his friend would do something so evil, not when he seemed to love his family so much. DeMarco is a wonderfully flawed protagonist, barely keeping his head above water after losing his son years earlier. This loss has caused his life to spiral out of control, which is why he finds it so unbelievable that Huston snapped and threw all he had away. So what happened that night, and why is Huston on the run? As DeMarco traces the suspect's steps and delves into a half-finished manuscript Huston left behind, he starts to uncover a tangled web of lies, deceit, and wrongdoing. VERDICT Silvis (The Boy Who Shoots Crows) has given us a suspenseful, literary thriller that will resonate with readers long after the book is finished. A terrific choice for Dennis Lehane fans. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/16.]--Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park H.S., MD

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016
One of the two leads in this impressive novel is author Thomas Huston; the other, Ryan DeMarco, is a policeman who quotes poetry and is flattered to be the writer's friend. Both men live in close relation to language, and that would seem to be a requirement for readers' complete enjoyment of Silvis' ambitious take on crime fiction. Huston's novels are both popular and respected, and he has a snug berth on the faculty of an English department. A beautiful family, too. So why did he kill them? And if he didn't, why has he vanished? DeMarco has a feeling that a solution to the mystery, as well as a key to his friend's whereabouts, lies in Huston's novel-in-progress. This leads him, much to his surprise, into a world of strip clubs and trailer parksand to phrases like, all the night's litter emptied now of its noise and bluff and whiskey-ed bravado. These literary interludes glow, but to the restless, they may serve to weigh down an intriguing thriller. On the other hand, readers with patience and a taste for sumptuous language will find the novel a treat.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)