Broken River

Following a string of affairs, Karl and Eleanor are giving their marriage one last shot by moving with their twelve-year old daughter Irina from Brooklyn to a newly renovated, apparently charming old house outside the upstate New York town of Broken River.

Before their arrival, the house stood empty for over a decade, the reason why no secret. Twelve years previously, a brutal double murder took place there, a young couple killed in front of their daughter. The crime was never solved, but theories have always swirled, and most locals consider the house cursed, its dereliction symbolic of the indelible stain of violence that occurred there.

The family may have left the deceptions of their city life behind them, but all three are still lying to each other. Karl soon reverts to his old cheating habits. Eleanor and Irina hide their fascination with the house’s ghoulish history from one another, taking perverse pleasure in separately researching their new home’s bloody past. But Karl’s digressions and Eleanor and Irina’s unwelcome investigations have consequences, and before long their duplicitous actions unleash forces none of them could possibly have anticipated, putting them in mortal danger.

This new novel by America’s master of literary rule-breaking is part thriller, part family drama, part gothic horror noir - and like all J. Robert Lennon’s novels, defies these categorisations to stand most of all as a work of unflinching moral purpose, showing the consequences of human deceitfulness, and the sometimes dreadful force the past can exert on the present.