I love this book, although the plot has its incoherences.
A very lyrical bildungsroman, but peppered with a series of very gruesome murders of schoolgirls contemporary with the hero Joseph Vaughan when he was at school.
Set initially in the 1940’s in rural Kentucky, so the presence of a German farming family adjacent to their land attracts suspicion. Joseph and his school friends set up a team of schoolboys to police the neighborhood, but the police don’t like this as they are too young. The murders continue as Joseph grows up and he falls in love with his schoolteacher, who subsequently dies in childbirth.
Joseph, now a budding novelist leaves Kentucky for New York, but his girlfriend there is murdered brutally. It transpires that the local sheriff from Kentucky has been the killer and Joseph shoots him at the end. Incoherencies – motivation of the killer, never articulated.
I enjoyed the book, not a very coherent review.
Opmerkingen