Lynn Hightower: High Water

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Georgie Smallwood is angry the night her mother dies. She is full of rage for her mother's unlived life: she never stood up to her domineering husband, she never once expressed a preference or an opinion.

Her mother was a graduate of the College of Martyred Southern Belles. "I will always be that child, mystified by my mother's motivations and decisions."

But at the hospital where the family gathers, Georgie's anger begins to transfer to her father. Why is he so insistent that he checked his wife every half hour, in the hours before her mysterious seizure? Why can't the hospital figure out what killed her?

There may be one murder, perhaps two, at the heart of this mystery set in middle-class, smalltown South Carolina, but it is really a beautifully written exploration of the mystery of the family - a place you can spend your whole life visiting without ever understanding what goes on in such a place.

New English Library

$22.95