Out of Season
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
When you lose a child, you become someone you don’t want to be, and you have to be that person for the rest of your life . . . I am a person I never wanted to be. A person who has lost a child.
Sorrow is David Caldwell's daily companion. Seven years ago, his thirteen-year-old son, Todd, killed his baby brother in an incident that was never fully explained, never quite forgiven. David hasn't seen Todd since he was released from juvenile prison two years ago. Now David wants to bring what's left of his family together again.
He arranges to meet Todd while on a temporary assignment as sheriff of Columbia Beach, the fading resort town where the family used to vacation. But Columbia Beach has troubles of its own. Cecil Edwards, a giant of a man, holds the town in his bullying grip. And a mysterious young woman, Lindsey Hunter, is quietly slipping into Cecil's life and raising the town's suspicions.
During the chilly months of the off-season, these four lives will intersect in ways both tender and violent. Old wounds will be exposed, broken hearts will be mended, and a new family bond will be created.
With the intensity of a Shakespearean tragedy, Robert Bausch draws on the heartbreak of loss and the power of redemption like no other writer.
“This novel blew my mind and tore open my heart. A brilliant exploration of human darkness,delusion, and desire for redemption.” —Beth Henley, author of Crimes of the Heart
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's lots of quiet mourning in Bausch's elegiac novel set in Columbia Beach, Md., a tourist town that's seen better days. County sheriff David Caldwell is in town on a professional mission to open up the disused jail and a much more important personal one: to reunite with his 20-year-old son, Todd, who's spent five years in a "juvenile detention center." When he was 13, Todd killed his younger brother, Bobby, and his father, plagued with anguish at the loss, still wonders whether the slaying was accidental or murder. Columbia Beach hardly seems to need a jail, except for the problematic Cecil Edwards, who terrorizes the town with his unpredictable behavior. Less happens than one might think given the novel's aura of violence. The main theme is grief assuaged by the redemptive power of love, embodied in the unusual character of Lindsey Hunter, an adoptee who seeks out her birth mother and discovers a brother (Cecil) and a soul mate (Todd). At times the prose is beautiful spare and lyrical and the empathy of Bausch (A Hole in the Earth) for all his characters is impressive, but the narrative arc remains hazily indistinct.
