Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The city of Pittsburgh is the best character in this workmanlike mystery.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. But as a mystery, the book is humdrum, boasting a starchy plot and unfortunate sentences such as, "When I unleashed all of my strength into his neck, his feet left terra firma and his head cartwheeled toward it."
Marathon runners will find much to enjoy in the book, which charts, mile by mile, the experience of participating in one of these races. This first novel by Hensley, himself a former police officer and marathoner, is a seductive love letter to Pittsburgh: The author is at his best describing its neighborhoods and scenic appeal.
Did Keller's graduate assistant, who attacks the professor with a crowbar, kill the girl? Did the nasty dean of academic affairs, who suspends Keller without cause, have something to do with her death? Or was it one of the other teachers at Three Rivers University? The murdered student, we learn, had her own hidden motive for coming on to Keller. The opening tease is that one of the other runners isn't going to make it to the finish line because Keller, knowing what he now knows, is going to kill him. After a female student who has made sexual advances toward him is found dead, Pittsburgh criminology professor and former cop Cyprus Keller conducts an independent investigation to clear his name and solve the murder.Ī marathon runner, Keller recalls the circumstances of the case as he competes in a long-distance run through Pittsburgh.
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