#18 in the Gregor Demarkian series.

I read this story shortly before there was a national (US) news story about a high school boy who was constantly harassed, physically, by school mates. He was beaten, jumped on at every turn; his life was made miserable. That is the subject of this well-written mystery novel: the cruel harassment of Elizabeth Toliver in high school by a clique of a half dozen girls, the “popular crowd”. . The ultimately most horrid act was to nail Elizabeth, whom the clique had nicknamed Betsy Wetsy after a doll that would wet her diapers and have to be changed, inside a park outhouse with 22 snakes that the girls had put in there, knowing that Elizabeth was utterly phobic about snakes. Now an adult and a very successful author with a rock-star lover, Elizabeth is till phobic about snakes and still cowed, frightened of those same 6 females, all of whom stayed in the small town in which they’d grown up. Elizabeth is returning to her home town, Hollman, PA, for the first time in almost 30 years to deal with her senile mother and in classic fashion of abused people, she both wants to return and dreads what will happen, because she knows she still can not stand up to that clique.

What makes that night 30 years ago even more horrifying is that a young life guard was murdered near the outhouse in which Elizabeth was screaming and beating herself bloody in an attempt to get out; the murder was never solved.

Because relationships in the Demarkian world are never really straightforward, Gregor becomes involved in Elizabeth Toliver’s life through the request of Jimmy Card, her lover; he wants Gregor to go to Hollman, investigate who is planting really vicious stories abut Elizabeth in the National Enquirer as well as investigate the murder that is now 32 years old. Card and his lawyer are pretty sure who is planting the stories, but they need proof that will convince Elizabeth to act to cut off the flow and the resulting ugly publicity. Gregor is more intrigued by the murder and soon becomes convinced that that somehow is the key.

So, he travels to Hollman—and naturally, more bodies show up. The first, however, is not that of a human being but of Elizabeth’s mother’s old dog, cruelly eviscerated. The dog is not the last, as we might expect. And the plot goes on from there.

Haddam seems far more interested in the characters in the former high school clique and their current lives and relationships, both to one another and to others in the town, than she really is in the mystery itself. As she points out in her introduction, this is the longest book she has written to date, and it is absorbed with exploring the reasons for and results of small town women, in particular, being frozen in time—during their high school years which were their peak times. While the murder part is well done, the sociological part, if we can call it that, is outstanding. And as I mentioned in the beginning, fits right into today’s headlines.

Making his appearance for the first but not the last time in the series is mark, Elizabeth’s bright, appealing teen aged son. Haddam has two sons, and it’s pleasant to speculate that she modeled mark and Geoff on her own boys. Certainly the last names are entirely too similar to be coincidental.

For me, this is one of her finest books. She ties it all together brilliantly. There are places where she could have used some better editing, but these are few and do not detract from the story. Highly recommended. ( )

If you remember high school as a set of cliques (jocks here, popular girls there, geeks ostracized), and you wonder what might happen if one of those geeks left the small town that high school was in, went off to the big city and became minorly famous, then returned to the town that the rest of the crowd never left, this book will satisfy you.

The returning geek was hideously mistreated by the popular girls during their high school years. The worst episode had them forcing her into an outhouse with a bunch of non-venomous but nonetheless terrifying snakes. At the same time, another high school student was murdered. Now she's returning to assess what she should do about her aging mother, and the cool kids don't know how to cope with her success.

Meanwhile, she's about to marry a gracefully-aging rock star, who happens to be a former lover of Bennis Hannaford, crime consultant Gregor Demarkian's love. The rock star enlists Demarkian to solve the old murder in hopes that the tabloids will have to get off his future wife's case once the real murderer is exposed.

High school is a long way back for me, but this story took me right back there. ( )