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Summary
Summary
A stunning literary thriller set in rural Vermont from the much praised author of Nightswimmer and Clara's Heart
Once a major reporter for a national newspaper, Catherine Winslow has retreated to the Upper Valley of Vermont to write a household hints column. While out walking during an early spring thaw, Catherine discovers the body of a woman leaning against an apple tree near her house. From the corpse's pink parka, Winslow recognizes her as the latest victim of a serial killer, a woman reported missing weeks before during a blizzard.
When her neighbor, a forensic psychiatrist, is pulled into the investigation, Catherine begins to discover some unexpected connections to the serial murders. One is that the murders might be based on a rare unfinished Wilkie Collins novel that is missing from her personal library. The other is her much younger lover from her failed affair has unexpectedly resurfaced and is trying to maneuver his way back into her affections.
Elegant, haunting and profoundly gripping, Cloudland is an ingenious psychological trap baited with murder, deception and the intricacies of desire.
Author Notes
Joseph Olshan is the award-winning author of ten novels including Nightswimmer and The Conversion . He spends most of the year in Vermont.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Olshan (The Conversion), known for his literary fiction, delivers a crime novel more likely to satisfy mainstream than genre readers. Catherine Winslow, a former investigative journalist and college professor, gets drawn into the hunt for a serial killer after finding the frozen body of a missing nurse in an orchard near her rural Vermont home. Conveniently, her neighbor on isolated Cloudland Road, Anthony Waite, is a forensic psychiatrist. Waite assists Det. Marco Prozzo in the police investigation, though it's never clear why they hold so much stock in Catherine's opinions. Catherine tries to draw literary connections between the murders and the plot of an unfinished Wilkie Collins novel, all while worrying about the reappearance of her former lover, Matthew Blake. Seventh Day Adventist literature found near several of the corpses suggests a religious motive. Though the crimes are based on real events, the lack of suspense and an unsympathetic heroine (Catherine once had a romance with a student that ended in violence) make for a less than satisfying mystery. Author tour. Agent: Mitchell Waters, Curtis Brown. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The consequences of love gone horribly awry are at the heart of this novel about serial murders. After writer Catherine Winslow finds the body of the latest victim in a melting snowdrift near her home on Cloudland Road in rural Vermont, she's recruited by her neighbor, psychiatrist Anthony Waite, to assist in the investigation and makes a connection between the killings and an obscure Wilkie Collins novel, The Widower's Branch. As she tracks down her copy of the book, she recalls loaning it to Matthew Blake, a student 15 years her junior with whom she had a love affair that ended violently and led to her losing her college teaching job. Living alone with a killer on the loose and her former lover back in the area, she has just a few neighbors nearby and her two dogs and a 250-pound potbellied pig for protection. Unlike the more common, adrenaline-fueled serial-killer thrillers, this is literary, character-driven fiction with remarkable empathy not only for those whom murder leaves behind but also for the perpetrator. Another fine performance from a critically acclaimed author.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Joseph Olshan has stepped up and written one for the home team. CLOUDLAND (Minotaur, $24.99) is set in the bleak Upper Connecticut River Valley that forms the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, a place where spring doesn't arrive until it's summer. Catherine Winslow, whose intimate narrative voice keeps directing our eyes to the beauty of this stark landscape, is taking a walk when she comes upon the half-frozen body of a woman in a pink parka, strangled and stabbed and left beneath an apple tree to spend the past winter under a blanket of snow. Olshan handles some genre conventions clumsily. Although the victim is the sixth woman in two years found murdered in the same fashion, the police investigation is undermanned and sloppily managed. It's also implausible that both the lead detective and the consulting forensic psychiatrist, who just happens to live up the road from Catherine, would use her as a sounding board. But the shaky mechanics don't matter so much once Olshan gets down to the real business of observing the destructive impact the killings have on this isolated region. This is the kind of rural community where the transplanted urban professionals living on Cloudland Road normally get along just fine with Yankee farmers like Hiram Osmond, a secondgeneration knacker who butchers dead farm animals, renders their carcasses and sells the good parts to people who like to decorate with skulls. Now neighbor no longer looks neighbor in the eye. The characters are complicated, and none more so than Catherine, who's struggling to recover from the painful breakup of an affair with a former student that cost her a good teaching job and caused a rift with her daughter. Although Olshan is merciful to all the cruel lovers, faithless spouses and angry children who live in this lonely place, the bracing clarity of his prose doesn't allow for false sentiment. (He describes one savagely mutilated murder victim as lying "as still as a deepforest kill.") When speaking of matters like romantic obsession and violence in close relationships, a voice like that really cuts through the air of a cold climate. James Runcie, son of a former archbishop of Canterbury, has written the coziest of cozy murder mysteries. SIDNEY CHAMBERS AND THE SHADOW OF DEATH (Bloomsbury, paper, $16) is a collection of stories set in a quaint English village during the 1950s and featuring a young Anglican vicar who finds spiritual inspiration in criminal investigation. Addressing certain suspicions about the suicide of a local solicitor, Canon Sidney Chambers, the new vicar of the church of St. Andrew and St. Mary in Grantchester, is reminded that "how we love determines how we live." And investigating the theft of a valuable ring during an elegant London dinner party leads him to wonder how much a person can change over the course of a lifetime. No matter how much fun he derives from his sleuthing, Sidney tells himself that solving a tough case can teach him a moral lesson: "how to live an honorable life and protect the greater good." Taken individually, each of these clerical whodunits poses a clever puzzle for armchair detectives. Viewed as a collective study of British life as it was lived when Elizabeth II first ascended the throne, these stories present a consistently charming and occasionally cutting commentary on "a postwar landscape full of industry, promise and concrete." Psychological suspense is the genre of choice for glorifying the bond between mother and child: mother rushes into burning building, sacrifices life to save child, earns place in paradise. More than a flip paradigm, that's the actual plot of AFTERWARDS (Crown, $25), a gripping novel by Rosamund Lupton about a mother's nightmare. Grace Covey is among the proud parents on the field for sports day at the Sidley House Preparatory School when a fire breaks out inside the building. Cut to the hospital, where Grace is in a coma with brain injuries and her "appallingly hurt" 17-year-old daughter, Jenny, is in the burn unit. To add to her woes, Grace's 8-year-old son, Adam, is suspected of having set the fire. The eerie thing is, both Grace and Jenny have slipped out of their damaged bodies and become ghostly detectives, which takes considerable pluck and ingenuity. The second-person narrative voice assigned to Grace has its limitations, mainly because it's addressed to her wooden and inconsequential husband. "Be kinder to your wife," she's compelled to admonish him. "Out-of-body experiences do happen." Readers who might have drifted away from Katherine Hall Page's pleasing mysteries starring Faith Fairchild, the congenitally curious wife of a New England minister and the proprietor of a catering company wittily named "Have Faith," should accept the homecoming invitation extended in THE BODY IN THE BOUDOIR (Morrow/HarperCollins, $23.99). Although it's the 20th book in the series, the story is set in 1990, when Faith is still single, living in Manhattan and about to be swept off her feet by a young cleric she meets while catering a wedding at the Riverside Church. After their storybook courtship, Faith is making wedding plans when someone at her bridal shower tries to poison her. To be honest, the attempts on Faith's life are pallid compared with the retro fun of perusing a vintage wedding menu, shopping at Bergdorf 's bridal salon and having tea at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel. Shallow pleasures, perhaps. But that's just the way it is. After a string of murders in a remote valley, neighbor no longer looks neighbor in the eye.
Library Journal Review
Out walking one late March afternoon, Catherine Winslow spies a body propped against a tree, and she knows it's a local woman who went missing that winter. Unfortunately, this case isn't an anomaly; a spate of killings is plaguing the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire. A former high-profile investigative reporter, 41-year-old Catherine has retreated to a remote farmhouse, where she writes a syndicated column. Additionally, she teaches writing at the local prison. Detective Prozzo- hires Catherine's neighbor friend Anthony to help with the profiling, since he has a background in forensic psychiatry. Anthony hashes over details of the crimes with Catherine. While the townspeople like to think an outsider is targeting their area, the authorities are thinking local. When a prime suspect turns out to be Catherine's ex-lover, the psychological tension ratchets up. VERDICT Rarely do you find a story with characters so fully developed that you feel as if they might live next door. Conjuring a distinctly 19th-century atmosphere, Olshan (The Conversion; Nightswimmer) excels at crafting a Dickensian literary piece, but the amount of detail may put off some readers expecting more action. Wilkie Collins fans, on the other hand, will be delighted by the role of the author of The Moonstone in this plot. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/11.] (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.