The Broken Key
By Paul Kilgore. (MCP Books/Itasca Press, 259 pages, $15.95.)
Tom Johnson has led an unremarkable life. At age 27 he is quick to pursue a passion and just as likely to drop it without warning. We meet him after he has walked out of a law school exam at the University of Minnesota, abandoning any hope of a career, and still wounded by the dissolution of his marriage, a failed flirtation with the seminary and his long struggle with "life's great restlessness."
The familiar drive back through swirling snow to his hometown of Duluth fills him with dread — how to share the news with his parents, especially his father, who has arranged for Tom to spend the holiday break clerking at the Duluth law practice that bears the Johnson name.
What follows is a series of misadventures and Tom's exploration of life through his association with Laura, a philosophical, rebellious and playful woman who works at the law firm. As serendipity would have it, Tom appears at a pivotal and heartbreaking time in Laura's life, and the two puzzle through personal crisis and their complex family ties like two deer lost in a snowstorm.
The author, Paul Kilgore, was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award for his short story collection, "Losing Camille." A Minnesotan through and through, Kilgore writes with love and authority about his state, using the Twin Cities and Duluth to establish familiarity with the often-absurd climate, and later scenes taking place at a cabin resort on fictional Dead Wolf Lake. "The Broken Key" is Kilgore's first novel, and he proves he can go the distance. A slow cabin read if ever there were one.
GINNY GREENE
A Crime in the Family
By Sacha Batthyány (DaCapo Press, 224 pages, $28.)
"A Crime in the Family" is a brilliant memoir and mystery rolled into one. Driven to learn more about secrets partially revealed in his dead grandmother's diary, author Sacha Batthyány journeys to the bowels of concentration camps, to survivors' homes and to the Austrian castle that sheltered Nazis and his family during World War II.
His anguished search for the painful truth takes him and readers to postwar Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Russia and even Argentina. His brutal discoveries also land him on a psychiatrist's couch as he tries to make sense of decades of family silence. This book is a fascinating jaunt, examining the raw legacy of war crimes and multi-generational blame and guilt. It is well worth the read.
DEE DEPASS
