What Strange Creatures
A Novel
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
Scandal, love, family, and murder combine in this gripping literary mystery by critically acclaimed author Emily Arsenault, in which a young academic’s life is turned upside down when her brother is arrested for murder and she must prove his innocence.
The Battle siblings are used to disappointment. Seven years, one marriage and divorce, three cats, and a dog later, Theresa still hasn’t finished her dissertation. Instead of a degree, she’s got a houseful of adoring pets and a dead-end copywriting job for a local candle company.
Jeff, her so-called genius older brother, doesn’t have it together, either. Creative, and loyal, he’s also aimless in work and love. But his new girlfriend, Kim, a pretty waitress in her twenties, appears smitten.
When Theresa agrees to dog-sit Kim’s puggle for a weekend, she has no idea that it is the beginning of a terrifying nightmare that will shatter her quiet world. Soon, Kim’s body will be found in the woods, and Jeff will become the prime suspect.
Though the evidence is overwhelming, Theresa knows that her brother is not a cold-blooded murderer. But to clear him she must find out more about Kim. Investigating the dead woman’s past, Theresa uncovers a treacherous secret involving politics, murder, and scandal—and becomes entangled in a potentially dangerous romance. But the deeper she falls into this troubling case, the more it becomes clear that, in trying to save her brother’s life, she may be sacrificing her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this captivating mystery from Arsenault (Miss Me When I'm Gone), Theresa Battle who has a houseful of pets in Thompsonville, Mass., and a dissertation she might never complete agrees to dog-sit for her brother Jeff's new girlfriend, waitress Kim Graber. Then Kim's body is discovered, the police arrest Jeff for the murder, and Theresa sets out to prove his innocence. Kim was obsessed with discrediting a local politician with whom she shared an unpleasant history, but Theresa learns the investigation has unearthed other people's dark secrets, too. Arsenault deftly blends pet humor and laugh-out-loud moments with the unfolding portrait of complex, multilayered Kim. Only Theresa's romantic entanglements with an English department colleague and one of Kim's coworkers, who both have information that could help Jeff, ring a false note. Still, Theresa's self-deprecating honesty and anecdotes about her dissertation subject, medieval mystic Margery Kempe, are as engaging as her loyalty to her brother and willingness to face unsavory truths about him and herself.
