Tigers in Red Weather

Starred review from June 25, 2012
Set in bucolic, hoity-toity post-WWII Martha’s Vineyard, this unnerving literary thriller from the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville finds a family unmoored by an unsolved murder in their apparently porcelain community. At the debut novel’s center are two woman, Nick and Helena, cousins who grew up spending summers at their family’s cushy lakeside estate. Once carefree girls, now jaded women, they’ve since returned to Tiger House with their families, but their lives have lost much of the rosy glow they had before the murder. Selfish and aloof, Nick can’t stay faithful to her husband, the devoted but emotionally stunted Hughes. Helena, living apart from her sycophantic filmmaker husband, prefers pills and booze to dealing with her poor excuse for a relationship. Meanwhile, Nick and Hughes’s surprisingly well-adjusted daughter, Daisy, is engaged to a man with not so subtle designs on her nearly acquiescent mother, while Ed, Daisy’s childhood confidant and Helena’s creepy son, is hell-bent on ensuring Daisy is treated with respect, no matter what the cost. Told from the biased and often unreliable perspectives of each of these five players, Klaussmann’s carefully crafted soap opera skillfully commingles mystery with melodrama, keeping readers guessing about what really happened until the end. While her characters’ duplicitous behavior will elicit strong reactions, Ed’s psychological progression is the most fascinating to watch. The shocking finale, seen through Ed’s all-knowing eyes, scintillates as much as it satisfies. Agent: Caroline Wood, the Felicity Bryan Agency.

June 1, 2012
Postwar marriage and motherhood are more complicated than two cousins expected in Klaussmann's smart, unsettling debut. In September 1945, Nick and Helena are drinking gin in their backyard in Cambridge, Mass., looking forward to the end of rationing and the beginning of their adult lives. Helena is headed for Hollywood to marry Avery Lewis, Nick to Florida to be reunited with her Navy veteran husband, Hughes Derringer. Part I chronicles that less-than-successful reunion from Nick's point of view, then moves back to Cambridge as both women become pregnant in 1947. Tiger House, Nick's family home on Martha's Vineyard, sees a turbulent summer in 1959 when Nick's daughter Daisy (this section's viewpoint character) and Helena's son Ed discover the corpse of a Portuguese maid. We eventually find out who killed Elena Nunes, but the focus is on simmering tensions within and between the two families as the narrative moves into the 1960s and expands to include Helena's, Hughes' and Ed's perspectives. Restless Nick has casual flings that make both Hughes and her unhappy. Avery, obsessed with a dead movie star, gets Helena hooked on pills and pimps her out to a producer. Passive-aggressive Helena, instead of dumping Avery, blames all her problems on the admittedly bossy Nick and encourages creepily detached Ed to resent Nick too. Daisy gets engaged to a young man who seems far too interested in her glamorous mother. Developments in the Lewis family strain credulity, but Klaussmann's pitch-perfect portrait of the Derringer marriage gives the novel a strong emotional charge. Nick is frustrated by life as a decorative appendage; Hughes is uneasily aware that the part of himself he's always held in reserve has something to do with her infidelities. Their complicated, painfully loving relationship and their mutual tenderness for fresh-faced Daisy ring true, while the odysseys of Helena and Ed clang with melodrama. Uneven, but stinging dialogue and sharp insights offer strong foundations on which this novice author can build.

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February 15, 2012

Along with a particularly evocative title and cover, this book has a red-hot plot. Having long summered together at Tiger House, the family estate on Martha's Vineyard, Nick and her cousin Helena go their separate ways: Nick with her husband, back from World War II, and newly married Helena to Hollywood. Alas, life never stays golden. Nick's husband has been snuffed out emotionally by the war, while Helena's is not what she had thought. The cousins meet at Tiger House to reassess, but a nasty murder throws their expectations further into turmoil. Lots of buzz for first novelist Klaussmann, a New York Times reporter, with a two-book deal, a huge advance, and rights sold to 18 territories and counting. Don't miss.

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