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THE SINGING BONE
by Beth Hahn
Little, Brown, March 2015
320 pages
$26.95
ISBN: 1942872569


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Beth Hahn's suspenseful and riveting novel, THE SINGING BONE, pulls the reader into a drug-fueled world of young people gathered into a Charles Manson-like "family" by a psychopathic, charismatic leader named Jack Wyck. The members of the group call him Mr. Wyck and the book provides brilliant insight into how a powerful personality could possibly take hold of the minds and souls of impressionable young people.

As in the best thrillers, the main character, Alice Wood, at first appears to be a normal person with a normal career. She is an academic, a professor of folklore, and she is researching a song about a murder, based on a Grimm fairy tale. The song has many versions, and each version has a different person as the guilty party. But Professor Wood's life is about to change. The year is 1999, and the famous filmmaker Hans Loomis pays her a visit. He is planning a movie about the events in which she was involved as a teenager. He has located not only Professor Wood but also other people involved in the group, including Mr Wyck, now incarcerated for murder. The action moves back and forth between the last days of the twentieth century and two decades earlier.

Alice Wood is really Alice Pearson, and her current hold on sanity seems to be loosening. When she was one of a group of teenagers under the spell of Mr Wyck, she had gradually lost her sense of self and began to think that she was part of an unfolding play. She and her friends had been lured into his ramshackle house by the promise of parties and fun, but their lives were slowly turned over to this Svengali. Some did not make it out alive; others were coerced into committing horrendous crimes. The present day Alice is unsure exactly what happened or what part she played since at the time she thought she was a character in the play they were all acting out. As new DNA evidence has surfaced, Mr Wyck may be paroled and Alice is pulled back into a horrifying past that she has tried to suppress. Even in prison, Jack Wyck is able to entrance, and people calling themselves Wyckians meet to enact the events that he once orchestrated. Alice believes one Wyckian is stalking her, but it is hard to know what is real and what is imagined.

If you ever wondered how a cult worked or how people could come under the influence of someone like Manson, this book, though fiction, is a real eye-opener. The characters get under your skin and you care about them as you watch their leader's sick desires mold and destroy their lives. Like the many versions of the folklore murder song, there are many versions of the truth, and the writer keeps us reading as we try to discover what really happened. SINGING BONE is a book that you will not be able to put down.

§ Anne Corey is a writer, poet, teacher and botanical artist in New York's Hudson Valley.

Reviewed by Anne Corey, February 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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