On the Rocks
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The year is 1929 and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Willa Cather and her partner Edith Lewis are summering on Grand Manan, an island in the Bay of Fundy. In their cottage’s sparsely-furnished attic room, Cather is at work writing Shadows on the Rock, her tenth novel. Edith is painting watercolors from the cliffs two hundred feet above the rising tides of Whale Cove. Out of the corner of her eye, Edith sees a body plunge from the edge of a cliff to the rocks below…. Solving the mystery, first-time novelist Sue Hallgarth’s intimate view of village politics and the goings-on of two women’s communities long lost to history is also a suspenseful and surprising crime novel. Hallgarth draws the reader into a unique retreat and an inside glimpse of the lives of a great American novelist and her talented life partner.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hallgarth, a Willa Cather scholar, gives starring roles to the great writer and her partner, Edith Lewis, in this rocky debut. The couple have found the perfect place to unwind and spend the summer of 1929: the picturesque island of Grand Manan in Canada's Bay of Fundy, where Willa works in peace on her new novel, Shadows on the Rock, and Edith focuses on her painting. Violence invades their haven when Edith spies a man plunging off one of the majestic cliffs to his death. The island's idyllic atmosphere tends to smother the suspense, but interest picks up once Willa and Edith begin finding evidence implicating several of the peaceful-seeming islanders in the fatal fall. Though Hallgarth offers a well-researched portrait of Grand Manan's tiny community, her scenic but bland whodunit is defeated by stilted dialogue and a protagonist who rarely amounts to more than a famous name.
