Peter Nichols – лучшие книги

A small town in coastal Maine is shaken to its core by a serial killer in this crime novel from Peter Nichols, bestselling author of The Rocks

In scenic Granite Harbor, life has continued on―quiet and serene―for decades. That is until a local teenager is found brutally murdered in the Settlement, the town’s historic archaeological site. Alex Brangwen, adjusting to life as a single father with a failed career as a novelist, is the town’s sole detective. This is his first murder case and, as both a parent and detective, Alex knows the people of Granite Harbor are looking to him to catch the killer and temper the fear that has descended over the town.

Isabel, a single mother attempting to support her family while healing from her own demons, finds herself in the middle of the case when she begins working at the Settlement. Her son, Ethan, and Alex’s daughter, Sophie, were best friends with the victim. When a second body is found, both parents are terrified that their child may be next. As Alex and Isabel race to find the killer in their midst, the town’s secrets―past and present―begin bubbling to the surface, threatening to unravel the tight-knit community.

“Irresistibly sunny… Set in the brightly lit Mediterranean amid old olive trees and sexual intrigue, music and wine and beautiful women... Propulsive.” –The New York Times Book Review

“The perfect book for pretending it's already beach season.” –O, The Oprah Magazine

A romantic page-turner propelled by the sixty-year secret that has shaped two families, four lovers, and one seaside resort community.

Set against dramatic Mediterranean Sea views and lush olive groves, The Rocks opens with a confrontation and a secret: What was the mysterious, catastrophic event that drove two honeymooners apart so suddenly and absolutely in 1948 that they never spoke again despite living on the same island for sixty more years? And how did their history shape the Romeo and Juliet–like romance of their (unrelated) children decades later? Centered around a popular seaside resort club and its community, The Rocks is a double love story that begins with a mystery, then moves backward in time, era by era, to unravel what really happened decades earlier.

Peter Nichols writes with a pervading, soulful wisdom and self-knowing humor, and captures perfectly this world of glamorous, complicated, misbehaving types with all their sophisticated flaws and genuine longing. The result is a bittersweet, intelligent, and romantic novel about how powerful the perceived truth can be—as a bond, and as a barrier—even if it’s not really the whole story; and how one misunderstanding can echo irreparably through decades.


From the Hardcover edition.

In a mock Tudor manor gone to seed lives 70-year-old Maud and her younger son, 45-year-old Mo. She speaks more to the soundless television than to him and he plays New Orleans jazz on his drums. An attempt to destroy this happy way of life is made on the occasion of the father's funeral by Hedley, the older son, and by Queenie, Mo's twin sister from California. But the cloistered pair prefer to remain in what is, in effect, a shed in the garden of Heartbreak House.

This play is about the nightmare all parents must have dreamed of at some time, that of living with a child born so hopelessly crippled as to be, as the father says, a human parsnip.