How many deaths?

‘Suspicion is a shifting shade,’ Mark tells the police lieutenant who’s questioning him, and no one appreciates the tensions of suspicion better than Thomas H. Cook. Cook remains relatively unknown, though he’s garnered numerous crime-writing awards, including an Edgar for The Chatham School Affair. Places in the Dark and last year’s Red Leaves rank among the very best suspense novels of the past two decades.

The Murmur of Stones is typical of Cook at his best. Its small-town setting is gently New England, a timeless stage that is the present but could just as easily be 50 years ago. It’s more the New England of John Cheever than Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft, yet just as horrific. The pleasantness masks the pressures and constrictions that come with it, just as Cook’s protagonists are usually people who think themselves comfortable and protected in such a setting. Their lives are unusually well-ordered, mundane, vaguely dis- appointing, and provide fertile ground in which to seed suspicion.