The Whaleboat House - Softcover

Mark Mills is a screenwriter. His film credits include The Reckoning, an adaptation of Barry's Unsworth's Morality Play, due for release in spring 2004. The Whaleboat House is his first novel.

*Starred Review* When a literary thriller succeeds beyond genre, it's often because the book's sense of place gives it extra depth. So it is in this striking first novel about a shocking murder in the Long Island community of Amagansett in the years immediately following World War II. When Basque fisherman Conrad Labarde lands the body of a New York socialite in his net, he knows it means trouble--for the Long Island natives, struggling to preserve their way of life against the onslaught of Manhattan wealth, and especially for him personally, since the victim was his lover. Screenwriter Mills expertly blends the fascinating history of Long Island's south shore into his story, incorporating not only the stories of immigrant fishermen but also those of Native Americans, the first group to be dispossessed as the island became more attractive to rich people. The novel combines a touching love story, told in flashback, with a nicely detailed procedural starring an unlikely investigative duo: the taciturn Basque and the Amagansett assistant police chief, who hopes to resurrect his career in the wake of scandal. Literarily inclined cop-novel fans will be reminded of Michael Malone, while nongenre types will find elements of John Casey's Spartina (1989) in the fishing story and in the conflict between locals and summer people. This is a novel to savor, both for its portrait of rough-hewn individuals finding selfhood beyond the breakers and for its snapshot of the postwar world not yet locked in the death grip of modernity. Bill Ott
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