Product Description

DavidSears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant younger sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, wholike David and Dianas fatheris schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jasons condition. Perhaps this is why, when Jason drowns, Diana will not accept the authorities conclusion that his death was accidental. Or perhaps Diana is going mad. She begins to send David faxes and e-mails about ancient murders, driven by her growing belief that the earth is Gaia, a living witness to her sons murder who could give evidence in the case she is building against her husband. David soon fears for his own familys safety as the seductive qualities of Dianas manic energy become impossible to ignore. In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #593470 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Jason Regan, a severely schizophrenic child, is found drowned in a pond behind his family's home in this unusual, chilling mystery from Edgar-winner Cook (Red Leaves). Jason's mother, Diana, believes that her ex-husband, Mark, has murdered their son. The story is narrated by Diana's brother, Dave Sears, who comes to believe Diana has gone insane. Dave has good reason to think so; their father was a raving paranoid schizophrenic. Cook employs a curious narrative structure, dividing the story into two alternating sections: one in which Dave is being interviewed by a police detective about an unnamed crime, written in second-person, and another that Dave narrates in first-person. In the beginning it's unclear if a crime occurred at all; the police rule that Jason walked into the pond on his own. Then it appears that there was not only one murder but possibly two, three or even four. Cook reveals all the pieces of the shocking story with an absolutely steady hand. It's a bravura performance. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Mania and mythology are among the intriguing topics tackled in this latest mystery from Edgar winner Cook. David and Diana Sears were raised by a paranoid schizophrenic father, who dispensed arduous intellectual quizzes and flew into frightening fits of rage. In his father's twisted world, David existed only in his brilliant sister's shadow; he was "checkers" to her "chess." When the father (referred to only as "the Old Man") dies, David is happy to see Diana getting on with her life. She marries a brainy biochemist and has a son, Jason. But it quickly becomes clear that Jason is not like other children: Could he have inherited his grandfather's devastating disease? When the boy drowns in the pond beyond just beyond his parents' rural Connecticut home, Diana resists police reports labeling his death an accident. She is certain Jason was murdered. She is soon sending David faxes and e-mails about ancient crimes and forming a disturbing attachment to David's impressionable teenage daughter. Is Diana slowly going insane? In crisp, chilling prose, Cook (Red Leaves, The Chatham School Affair) deftly juxtaposes the maddeningly complex Sears family and a straight-shooting detective "rooted in a world where crimes leap like fish from crystal streams of motivation." Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Publishers Weekly starred review
"Unusual, chilling ... Cook reveals all the pieces of the shocking story with an absolutely steady hand. It's a bravura performance."

Customer Reviews

"It's in her blood of course, all this craziness"
"It's in her blood of course, all this craziness," says Mark Sears, the estranged husband of Diana Sears who unwittingly becomes the primary focus of Diana's campaign to prove that something murderous has happened to her son Jason. Recently Jason drowned in the lake behind the family home but the court rules that Jason's death was a mishap, an "accidental" death.

Diana is absolutely devastated at the verdict, certain that it is Mark that had something to do with their son's fate. Disappointed that Jason had begun to display the same signs of paranoid schizophrenia as Diana's father, Mark had gradually begun to separate himself from his son, disillusioned by the fact that Jason had turned out less than perfect, born with the problem so serious that it had unhinged him, cutting him of from others.

Diana was determined to protect Jason, "for as long as he lives, no one is going to take Jason, and absolutely no one is going to get rid of him." After his death, Diana becomes unhinged, "her flesh abruptly hardening, holding everything inside." Abruptly she moves out of her house, her life clogged with loss and grief and pain and she becomes filled with a divisiveness that will characterize much of the direction that her life will eventually take.

It is left to Diana's kindly brother Dave to help her wrestle her demons as he narrates his story to a local detective by the name of Petrie who also feels that Jason's death might not have been an accident. In this eerie setting, Dave recounts his knowledge of the events leading up to Diana's accusations where he comes to believe that Mark is not the only one beginning to fear her.

After a trip to the morgue, Diana accompanies her accusations against Mark with the maze of bizarre associations, her enquiry into Jason's death becoming almost like a pseudoscientific enterprise, a concoction made up of scraps from anthropology, forensics, mysticism, and even a badge of Marks. She sends him bizarre emails and faxes about prehistoric Iron Age murders, labeling them with the word "sinner," and spends all of her time ensconced in the local library researching all the weird murders of history.

Abby, Dave's wife senses that Mark is somehow in danger, but what in actuality is Dave supposed to warn Mark about? Meanwhile, Diana voraciously courts Dave's her teenage niece Patty, seducing her with tales of death and of Mark's possible involvement, Dave gradually sees his daughter as becoming hapless victim of Diana's enigmatic sorcery.

Dave, no longer the passive observer, turns Diana's - and indeed his own world - upside down as he is finally forced to confront a mad witches brew of family secrets and the very real possibility that Diana herself has inherited their father's troubling gene, and as Diana's frenzied mind runs rampant, Dave can barely make sense of all that he hears and sees.

Is Diana a seductive manipulator who is seeking to defile Mark's character for no good reason? Or does she have some real proof that Mark was responsible for Jason's death? And it suddenly occurs to Dave that perhaps this has been Diana's design all along, to bring her brother back to Jason for a murder she clearly thought no less painfully resolved.

In the Cloud of Unknowing Thomas H. Cook explores the delicate link between madness and intuition, and the fact that we can never really truly know anyone, perhaps even members of our own family. We see our lives through a prism of other possibilities, and when we look deeper than into the simple, shallow pool in which we swim, we in fact "are left staring bare-eyed into an unfathomable abyss."

The novel works well as a grippingly creepy literary thriller and Cook constantly plays tricks on us - we are never quite sure where any of the characters stand or who is in reality telling the truth. The Cloud of Unknowing is also a provocative study of the cyclical nature of mental illness and the dreadful consequences of one woman's realization that her life has been plagued with ills and torments that she unfortunately could not foresee. Mike Leonard April 07.