Green Lake

A suddenly widowed and penniless woman is forced to move into her sister's vacation cabin on Green Lake. But instead of quiet and solitude, she finds herself immersed in a world of depravity, blackmail and - ultimately - murder.And what should she think of the tall and taciturn Native American who lives next door?From one of the most sophisticated novelists utilizing the explosive mating of the terrifying and the deceptively prosaic, comes this hair-raising story of a most unlikely couple who find themselves dangerously alone in an alien world.

From Publishers Weekly

Rural Kansas is to Epperson (The Neighborhood) what rural Maine is to Stephen King: an outback where outlandish terror lurks. The setting in this curious, fractured novel is the isolated Kansas village of Green Lake, where anthropology professor Madeleine Heron moves to a vacation cabin to recover from her husband's suicide. There, Madeleine meets an assortment of odd, troubling neighbors, including Eris Renard, a lonely, mountain-sized Indian conservation officer whose scarred face and gruff manner can't fully hide his good heart. Epperson excels at creating vibrant characters, all of them wounded in one way or another. Their web of relationships?especially a growing love between Madeleine and Eris that's threatened by Eris's reunion, after 27 years, with his birth mother, who is vehemently anti-white?form a narrative skein that hoists the story above melodrama. And that's good, because the drama here is cheesy and lurid, involving child-slayings, a local official who likes to run people down in his car and another local who literally loves the dead. Epperson's skills at evoking the human heart far exceed her ability to create suspense that can make the heart pound. Increasingly, she seems like a mainstream author who's wandered into the psychological suspense genre by accident and can't find her way out. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Summertime in that bucolic retreat, Green Lake, Kansas, and the living is easy--if you don't mind the assortment of perverts and grotesques that Epperson left out of The Neighborhood (1995). Reeling from the suicide of her husband, anthropology professor Madeleine Heron accepts her sister Jacqueline's offer of a cabin in Green Lake. The nearest neighbors, Sherman and Gudrun Tanner, like to dig in their yard (and other people's) so much that Jacqueline calls them Earthworm and Mole Woman. A little further off, there's unemployed Ronnie Lyman, who's just dropped his youngest daughter off at his mother's so he and his wife can pretend she's been kidnapped and angle for publicity and sympathy cash. Of course Madeleine can't forget Bruce Beckworth, the good old boy whose determined advances have to be beaten back by conservation officer Dale Russell, whose smooth good looks and political connections (his aunt is governor of Kansas) would make him a great catch if he weren't a murderous child molester. So there's nobody left for Madeleine, ``dying of boredom and anxiety,'' to take up with but Dale's fellow-officer, Eris Renard, a scarred Sauk-Fox Indian she somehow kindles a romance with despite her diffidence and his sullen reserve. Eris has been looking for years for the birth mother who put him up for adoption, and he finds her just as his affair with Madeleine is at its steamiest. Naturally, she turns out to be just another threat to her peace of mind--a wealthy, possessive artist who wants Eris to come and live with her in Santa Fe and isn't crazy about his fling with a white woman. This volatile cargo of creeps mostly broods on their injuries and resolves to avenge them; the final tally will be five fatalities, no arrests. Even so, Epperson's seventh formula thriller is atypically sunny, with only scattered clouds and little real menace to the heroine. The rest of the cast is too busy killing each other off. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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