Boundary
The Last Summer
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the deep woods of the Maine borderlands, the legend of huntsman Pete Landry is still told around cottage campfires to scare children, a tragic story of love, lust, and madness. During the early summer of 1967, inseparable teenage beauties Sissy Morgan and Zaza Mulligan wander among the vacation cottages in the community of Boundary, drinking and smoking and swearing, attracting the attention of boys and men. First one, and then the other, goes missing, and both are eventually found dead in the forest. Have they been the victims of freak accidents? Or is someone hunting the young women of Boundary? And if there is a hunter, who might be next? The Summer of Love quickly becomes the Summer of Fear, and detective Stan Michaud, already haunted by a case he could not solve, is determined to find out what exactly is happening in Boundary before someone else is found dead.
A story of deep psychological power and unbearable suspense, Andrée A. Michaud’s award-winning Boundary is an utterly gripping read about a community divided by suspicion and driven together by primal terror.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Part coming of age story, part mystery, and part psychological thriller, Michaud's tense 10th novel, which won a Canadian Governor-General's Award when it was first published in 2014, recounts the story of a small lakeside summer community ravaged by the murder of two teenage girls in 1967. People in the community start to believe they are being tormented by the ghost of Pierre Landry, a trapper who lived in the woods around the lake and committed suicide 30 years before because he'd fallen in love with a woman who would not have him. The girls are found in his old traps. The community blames the girls for their own deaths: "It was thanks to their beauty and Maggie Harrison's, and to that of all happy and desirable woman, that Pete Landry's traps had emerged from the dark earth, and with them the violence of other men," a leitmotif that recurs throughout the novel. The novel leans towards an investigation of the psychological effects of such events on both the community and the policemen investigating the case, an effort that is lost in the sometimes awkward translation. The book relies on stereotypical thriller tropes, ham-fisted foreshadowing, and obvious observations, but the final revelation still manages to surprise.
