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Dan Stone has plenty of demons to deal with. His father is dying, prompted by the suicide of Dan's brother. The suicide is directly connected to the death of Dan's wife. These two deaths happened at Hemlock Lake, a close-knit community in the Catskills. Dan's boss wants him to go back there to investigate the vandalism centered on a developers' project. The town is not at all happy that one of their own sold his land to outsiders, and to developers at that. Dan is caught between his job and the fury of the people he grew up with. He knows everybody, and that's a lot of why he left Hemlock Lake in the first place. Now he's back, and still everybody thinks they know him, know where he's coming from, what he'll do. When he tries to do his job and really investigate the threats and the vandalism, they consider him a traitor and react accordingly. While he's trying to cope with the external problems, his internal demons won't leave him alone. He dreams about his wife's death, about his inability to save her, about his brother's suicide. This doesn't make for peace of mind, and definitely gets in the way of his job. His guilt grows even greater when he becomes involved with a woman, not a local, who presents yet another challenge to the traditions of Hemlock Lake. HEMLOCK LAKE is a well-written mystery. While some plot elements are easy to decipher, the sum is better than the parts. Dan Rose is a complex character, blinded in many ways by his loves. The motivations for the various people are all believable, all are motives one is likely to encounter in "real life." For those readers who have had the sometimes dubious pleasure of growing up in a town like Hemlock Lake, the setting and the ambience will seem quite familiar. Rose has that down, including the insularity and the seeming omniscience of the locals. HEMLOCK LAKE is a very good book. § P.J. Coldren lives in northern lower Michigan where she reads and reviews widely across the mystery genre when she isn't working in her local hospital pharmacy.
Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, August 2010
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