The Swimming Pool

Seven years ago, Cecil and Marcella had an affair. On the night Cecil ended it, his wife was murdered; a year later he was dead from a heart attack. Now Cecil's grown children, Callie and Jed, are at Cape Cod for the summer, along with Marcella's daughter, Toni, who's employed as a nanny. Jed and Marcella have an affair. Kathe Mazur plays it straight with this racy tale of lust, illicit sex, murder, and more lust. Mazur adopts authentic accents and tones for essentially unlikable characters--Italian Marcella is aloof and a bit throaty; Southern Jed is lustful and angry a good deal of the time. Minor characters are also distinct--college-age Toni is frustrated with her parents, and Callie is unable to cope with her unsmiling premature baby. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

December 7, 2009
Strong writing keeps the reader sucked in to LeCraw's painful family drama debut. The lovely Marcella is reeling from tragedy; her ex-husband, Anthony, has sent Toni, their only daughter, away to boarding school and on to college. The man with whom Marcella had an affair, Cecil McClatchey, dies in a car accident soon after his wife, Betsy, is murdered. Amid the wreckage is Cecil's daughter, Callie, fighting for her sanity with two young children, and his son, Jed, who, desperate to fill the void left by the death of his parents, seeks answers from Marcella only to begin a tortured love affair with her as she drowns in guilt, struggling to find some meaning to hold on to. As Marcella comes closer to the truth about Betsy's murder and Cecil's death, and mindful that she is now the lover of Cecil's son, she struggles and fails to gather strength enough to make any decision, right or wrong. It is a story of deep and searing love, between siblings and lovers, but most powerfully, between parents and their children.