Angel's Head - Hardcover

Fear of the future and dreams of the past collide in the remote New England island setting of this evocative, affecting tale by the author of Winter by Degrees . The island of Angel's Head draws its own back as a summer ends. Mark is an unfulfilled journalist. Eliot is a developer who once planned to link the island to the mainland by bridge, a prospect that split apart the island community. Anne, an innkeeper hanging on as the island economy bottoms out, has loved--and still does--both men. But she has married another and has a teenage daughter and a taciturn father to support. Also on hand is Anne's brother Randall, the victim of a nasty head injury years before. The first murder leaves Eliot gutted like a fish and brings two mainland cops who are interested in Mark's recent whereabouts. The story line is fragmented with more death, many sexual encounters (mostly Anne's, but also her daughter's), an excess of red-herring characters and a merely satisfying resolution. Smolens's prose, however, is an understated marvel, the kind of word wizardry that will draw non-genre readers into the crime fold. The dialogue is elliptical and pitch perfect, while the setting--the land and sea observed through fall and into winter--glistens with powerful sensuality.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nobody changes Angel's Head Island, nestled a few hundred yards and years off Cape Cod; people who don't share the Flood family's centuries-old closeness to the sea just leave, as journalist Mark Emmons and developer Eliot Bedrosian both did years ago after variously abortive affairs with innkeeper Anne Flood. Now both Emmons and Bedrosian are back, the developer with new designs on Anne and his long-cherished project of a bridge connecting the island to the mainland. But he isn't going to succeed this time, either, because somebody's gutted him and carefully placed his heart in the Floods' storage locker. A die-hard opponent of the bridge, evidently--and there are plenty of those--but then why is the second victim, a cousin of patriarch Emerson Flood, one of the bridge's most outspoken opponents? Emmons, the mainland police, and Anne's inquisitive teenage daughter Sarah all work at cross- purposes to solve a mystery that's never all that mysterious. As in Winter by Degrees (1988), great scenery, hit-or-miss plotting, suitably hooded characters, and a handful of powerfully craggy episodes. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.