JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Myriad twists and turns juice the plot and deepen the atmosphere in Hart’s moody second offering.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. When a third victim appears, Nora must put aside her torn feelings about her imminent return to the States-and the prospect of leaving her Irish lover, Cormac Maguire-to catch a ruthless killer with a taste for triple death. Manager Owen Cadogen is livid, not only at having to stop work but also because of unfinished business with Ursula Downes, the head archaeologist. Nora, an expert on bog bodies, has no sooner arrived from Dublin than another multiply murdered victim turns up in the peat, this time wearing a wristwatch that indicates a somewhat later demise. But sometimes the earth yields up treasures with no monetary value-like an Iron Age body, preserved by its immersion, and showing signs of triple death: garroted by a leather cord, throat slashed, and drowned in a ritual associated with Celtic human sacrifice. The Loughnabrone hoard of Iron Age artifacts netted Dominic Brazil and his younger brother Danny $20,000, although rumors persist that they didn’t turn over quite everything they found to the National Museum.

Bad things come in threes when pathologist Nora Gavin ( Haunted Ground, 2003) is called to examine an ancient corpse buried in the peat at Loughnabrone Bog.īog excavation is part archaeology, part commerce, and those who harvest peat often come across unexpected treasure.

Lake of sorrows by erin hart