Ticks and crosses

Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would that really happen on the night before a wedding in a swanky house in Connecticut, killing daughter, daughter’s fiancé and owner’s lover? It seems too good to be true —the perfect big bang to set a novel in motion — and it made me distrustful from the start. It’s bad enough for a fictional weirdo to engineer such a disaster, but it’s worse for a novelist to engineer one, just so he can crack open a cast of characters’ sorrowful interior monologues and keep them going for a novel’s length.

Did You Ever Have a Family is a strange book: a psychological thriller that intrigues rather than thrills. The author, Bill Clegg of the Clegg Agency in New York, is a high-powered literary agent who has written powerfully about his past drug addictions (Ninety Days and Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man).