Masters of the House

August 29, 1994
Veteran Barnard (A Fatal Attachment), never a formulaic plotter, delivers a moving, low-keyed story set in the English city of Leeds in the late 1970s. After Ellen Heenan, mother of four, dies with her baby in childbirth, her unemployed husband Dermot collapses and the teenagers Matthew and Annie take over, driven by a desperate fear of being split up and ``taken into care.'' The two tend to their helpless father in his upstairs bedroom, care for the younger boys and go to school-all the while hiding Dermot's breakdown fom the outside world. Weeks later, a new problem arises with the intrusive visits of Carmen O'Keefe, whose persistence confirms Matthew's suspicions of Dermot's infidelity. Upon the discovery of Carmen's body, knifed to death, on their doorstep one night, the two handle the crisis with their newly developed cool. Their secret upstairs is soon uncovered by Carmen's visiting Irish mother-in-law, who promply takes loving charge of the family and raises the children to adulthood. Not until then, despite Matthew's fitful investigative efforts, is Carmen's killer revealed in this affecting story whose gentle tone belies its chilling solution while paying homage to its gutsy young siblings.

September 15, 1994
Novel-a-year-Barnard nonetheless keeps coming up with new departures for himself. His latest is a mystery set within the confines of an ordinary family--ordinary until the mother dies in childbirth, leaving behind a distraught husband and four children, the oldest of whom, Annie and Matthew, must in effect run the household now. These two kids pretend to the outside world that life in their house is running smoothly despite their terrible loss--what the world doesn't know is that their father has come completely unglued. Further trouble starts when a woman comes knocking on their door, suspecting things are awry, and they fear they may be taken away from their father; then Annie and Matthew find this woman murdered in their garden, bury her, and wonder who done it. Who did do it turns out to be someone much closer to them than they could have expected. ((Reviewed September 15, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)