Overview
Sullen and withdrawn, homesick and angry, fourteen-year-old Eliot Gardener has been headed for trouble ever since his family moved from Nova Scotia to the damp, grey Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. But not like this. Not standing on the bramble-choked, blood-soaked beach where his parents lie murdered—and his sister slashed—by the machete he has turned on them...and can't remember why!
Some say Eliot is a bad seed. RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg doesn't buy that. But the case weights heavily on him, for he knew the Gardeners and he should have seen something coming. And now, poisoning the joy of his and Cassandra Mitchell's wedding plans, a piece of his own past—the survivor of another shattered family—is stalking him. Someone else he's failed. Someone who wants revenge.
And until he can lay to rest the madness of that past, Alberg cannot hope to enter the silent mind of Eliot, where a time bomb is ticking away.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Although she opens with a forthright murder, Wright (Prized Possessions) eschews the whodunit and even the whydunit to explore dark subplots lacking simple answers. Karl Alberg, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police staff sergeant in the small village of Sechelt, B.C., detected tension in the Gardener family, but he didn't expect 14-year-old Eliot Gardener to murder his parents with a machete. Refusing to dismiss him as a ``bad seed,'' Karl takes an interest in the boy, who refuses to talk to police or social workers at the youth shelter where he is confined. Similarly uncommunicative is Jack Coutts, who has been nursing a grudge against Karl since they were neighbors years ago but only now has turned up to follow Karl around the streets of Sechelt. Although Jack's presence makes Cassandra Mitchell, Karl's significant other, decidedly edgy, Karl explains only that the issue is personal, not work-related. While Jack and Karl circle each other like dogs doomed to fight if their eyes meet, Eliot makes friends with another troubled youth in the detention centerfrom which they soon escape. These two stories never converge as Wright opts for a juxtaposition of parallel psychologies (Eliot's and Jack's) rather than intersecting plots, holding this tale together less with suspense than with a relentlessly brooding tone. (Dec.)Library Journal
When a troubled teenager kills his parents, staff sergeant Karl Alberg of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who knows the kid, feels partly responsible. Alberg's obsessive ruminations almost interrupt fiance Cassandra's nuptial plans, as does the reappearance in town of another troubled party-a former neighbor who once attacked him for no apparent reason. Wright (Mother Love, LJ 9/1/95) builds tension that leads to further psychological rumblings, escape, and suicide. A good mixture of characterization and police procedure. For larger collections.Kirkus Reviews
Why would teenager Eliot Gardener suddenly take a machete to his family as they toiled alongside him on a Sechelt beach, killing his father and mother and seriously wounding his beloved eight-year-old sister Rosie? Wright, too cagey a pro to offer a quick answer (or even much hope for a slow one), instead pairs this riddle with another: Why did salesman Jack Coutts once beat up Sgt. Karl Alberg? For that matter, why has Coutts, mourning his own wife and daughter, drifted back to the coast of British Columbia packing a gun and evidently intending to use it to postpone Alberg's marriage to his live-in librarian, Cassandra Mitchell, to the indefinite future? Taking as her model Barbara Vine's retrospective studies of guilt, Wright plunges back into the history of Coutts's fey, troubled wife—even as Eliot, partnered by an amazingly resourceful little kid not much older than the sister he attacked, breaks out of the detention center he's been sent to without a clue where he's going or what he'll do. Despite the high body count and the promise of more action, the uncharacteristically languid story never really escapes the toils of the past—but that's exactly Wright's point, as she labors to trace the outlines of these strangers beneath the masks they've worn to each other for years.Not by a long shot the best of Alberg's dozen cases (Mother Love, 1995, etc.), but one of the most ruminative and touched with hope.