Product Description

Attorney Henry Griswald has a secret: the truth behind the tragic events the world knew as the Chatham School Affair, the controversial tragedy that destroyed five lives, shattered a quiet community, and forever scarred the young boy. Layer by layer, in The Chatham School Affair, Cook paints a stunning portrait of a woman, a school, and a town in which passionate violence seems impossible...and inevitable. "Thomas Cook's night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting," raved the New York Times Book Review, and The Chatham School Affair will cement this superb writer's position as one of crime fiction's most prodigious talents, a master of the unexpected ending.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #332231 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-01
• Released on: 1997-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Amazon.com
In 1926 Henry Griswald was a kid, a student of the lovely and unusual Elizabeth Channing, who had recently arrived in his coastal Massachusetts village to teach art at a private school run by his father. Decades later, the people of Henry's village are still racked by guilt and troubled by uncertainty--who, or what, drove Miss Channing to madness and murder? Henry Griswald, narrator of The Chatham School Affair, holds the key. Using the same dark, brooding tone that permeated Breakheart Hill, Thomas Cook has crafted a disturbing yet entertaining psychological thriller.

From Publishers Weekly
Like the best of his crime-writing colleagues, Cook (Breakheart Hill) uses the genre to open a window onto the human condition. In this literate, compelling novel, he observes the lives of people doomed to fates beyond their control and imagination. One character here comments: "If you look back on your life and ask, What did I do?, then it means that you didn't do anything." Elizabeth Channing is trying to change the path of her life as, in 1926, she arrives to teach art at a small boys' school located in the Cape Cod village of Chatham. Believing that "life is best lived at the edge of folly," she immediately enthralls the novel's narrator, Henry, the headmaster's son. But Elizabeth is drawn to a fellow teacher, Leland Reed, a freethinker who is unhappily married and has begun to have serious doubts about his life. The inevitable tragedy and its aftermath is narrated by a mature, melancholy Henry looking back at the strange, bleak fates of those involved. Cook is a marvelous stylist, gracing his prose with splendid observations about people and the lush, potentially lethal landscape surrounding them. Events accelerate with increasing force, but few readers will be prepared for the surprise that awaits at novel's end. Literary boundaries mean little to Cook; crime fiction is much the better for that.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The destruction that passion can wreak is well demonstrated in this austere new novel by the author of Breakheart Hill (LJ 7/95). From the August day in 1926 that Elizabeth Channing comes to teach art at a private school outside Boston, Henry Griswald, son of the headmaster, finds himself a willing accomplice in the love affair between Channing and Leland Reed, a World War I veteran and fellow teacher. Now a bachelor in his seventies, Griswald looks back over a year in his adolescence that culminated in violent death and the destruction of innocent lives, a year that taught him the dangers of strong emotions. Although none of the characters except Henry is well developed?it's particularly difficult to understand what attraction the lovers have for each another?Cook effectively builds the tension through the use of foreshadowing. This well-written, genre-stretching mystery starts slowly and delivers a powerful ending. Appropriate for public libraries of all sizes.?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A wonderful affair
Thomas H. Cook's "The Chatham School Affair" is a different type of read from the sort I usually tackle, and my first novel authored by Cook.

I'm an impatient fan of the suspenseful page-turner. Reading this novel was a refreshing read. I likened it more to literary fiction than the contemporary thriller or suspense/mystery.

The prose is flawlessly written in a style so descriptive, I was moved with the characters' own emotions and felt surrounded in Cook's settings.

The actual story moves brilliantly from past to present, focusing more on the events of the past. It is the narrator's recollection of a series of events that lead to a series of deaths in small-town Massachusetts, in the late 1920's.

Despite the slower pace than that which I was used to, I found myself reading on, compelled to answer Cook's chief question, "What really happened at Black Pond that day?"

The ending ties all together neatly and unexpectedly, though there were some descriptive passages in the middle that could have been eliminated or shortened.

The Chatham Affair
This sensitively written book is one of Thomas Cook's finest. He introduces not only the characters with a flourish - but embraces the entire surroundings of the community, thus, creating an atmosphere conducive to relaxing. The reader enters a world of slower living in a beautiful location. I, myself, have frequented just such a place and have considered it to be the first step into heaven. In fact, in reading this, I was able to once again hear the ocean breeze rustling through the scrub pines. It created a certain nostalgia in my soul and reminded me, once more, that people are similiar - no matter what period in time they exist.

Another good read from Mr. Cook
Thomas Cook appears to use a similar theme in many of his psychological mysteries: the conflict between passion/impulse and the need to do good for others and society. His books also present the theme of what irrevocable damage can be done by a particular deed or behavior. His technique of telegraphing inward, working from the future to the present is very interesting as a literary technique. I enjoy his novels immensely. They are intelligent and page-turners.