THE DARK HOUSE

A Boston investment counselor’s attempt to escape the unbearable secrets of his childhood through compulsive voyeurism leads him back to the heart of his family nightmare.

Edward Rollins is worth something like $1.75 million, so he doesn’t really need the money. But a man has to do something, so since he lost his reporter’s job, Rollins has worked by day for Johnson Investments. It’s at night that he comes alive, waiting in his car for other cars—attracted perhaps by a particular color or model or license number—and then tailing them to see where they lead him. One night he follows his oblivious quarry to North Reading, 20 miles away, before the driver pulls up outside a house, goes in, but never turns on the lights. Unnerved, Rollins slinks off—but it’s already too late to crawl back into his hole. The next day, he takes Johnson co-worker Marj Simmons into his confidence, and she briskly takes charge of what rapidly blossoms into a full-blown investigation that links the man in the dark house to Rollins’s babysitting cousin Cornelia Blanchard, who vanished seven years ago. (It was his obsession with gathering information on her disappearance, in fact, that got Rollins fired from his paper.) With excruciating slowness, Sedgwick unfolds the story of Rollins’s sorry family—his long-departed father, his unfeeling mother, his sister Stephanie, drowned in infancy—all the while drawing out Rollins’s paranoid terror over everyone from the drivers he now feels are watching him to his new neighbor and her five-year-old daughter, who never did go to the hospital that night her mother said she was so sick. By the time the last veil is torn away from the family vault, most readers will be far too firmly hooked to notice how unsurprising the whole story has been.

Frederick Busch meets Blow-Up in a nerve-shredding debut.