The Zeleckis family – father Hirsch, mother Hilly, and son Matt – used to spend every summer in their holiday home in the remote mountains of Utah, United States. Their nearest neighbours were another holidaying family, the Minnellis, and their four sons, the youngest, Steve, being Matt’s particular friend.
That was all a long time ago. Hilly has died of cancer. Mr. Minnelli is also dead, killed in an apparent accident with his own gun. All contact with the Minnelli family has been lost. Matt is now a doctor, not a GP like his father but a successful surgeon at a Salt Cake City hospital, and happily married to Denise. They have a beloved son, Austin. However, Matt finds it difficult to cope with Denise’s complicated feelings for her dead first husband, Weslake, and her father. Then a life-and-death decision that Matt has to take in his capacity as doctor troubles him, and he turns to his father, now frail and living alone in the family holiday home, for advice and support. But now the past begins to intrude, and secrets start to unravel. In an exciting denouement, Hirsch and Matt travel deep into the mountains to hunt for elk and to confront the truth of their pasts and to be confronted by real and immediate danger.
This is an ambitious novel, not just a who-dun-it, but also a work of serious literary fiction. It deals with memory and forgetting, of how, although we may choose what we remember and what not, the truth of the past is always there. It is a long book (495 pp.) and beautifully written, a pleasure to read and to reflect on afterwards.
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Radmila May
Other titles by Elizabeth Rigbey: Total Eclipse, Summertime