Having lived in so many areas of the country, I have always enjoyed reading works of fiction by authors who are local to the area where I am currently living. It is interesting to get a regional historical perspective through the intertwining of real places, people and events in order to understand the backdrop for an author’s story.

Anita Shreve is a masterful author from New England who has taken a real event—a horrific double murder of two Norwegian women in the Isle of Shoals in the late 1800’s, and married it with the story of a modern-day photojournalist who is investigating this “crime of the century” murder. The story is set off the coast of Maine on the island of Smuttynose, where Jean is researching the details of the bloody axe-murder. Jean and her poet-husband Thomas set out on a weekend boat trip with their 9-year-old daughter Billie, on a sailboat captained by Thomas’ brother Rich, along with Rich’s latest, and very flirtatious girlfriend, Adeline. Adeline seems to have a very specific knowledge of Thomas’ poetry, which she continues to quote back and forth with Thomas during the boat trip, to the point where Jean becomes suspicious of Adeline’s familiarity with her husband. Meanwhile, Jean uses some old letters and a diary of Maren’s to shed light on what might have happened to cause the infamous axe-murder on this small island off the coast of Maine.

Shreve concurrently weaves in the storyline of the Norwegian wife, Maren, who is married at a young age to a fisherman from Norway who becomes obsessed over moving to America, where much wealth is to be made in the fishing business. She ends up isolated on a bleak, cold island, where she has very little contact with other people, until her older sister Karen arrives and imposes herself into the already small, dreary space that Maren and her husband share. Another lodger, Louis Wagner becomes entrenched as a tenant in the already-cramped duplex house, and he eventually becomes accused of the bloody murder that takes place. The problem becomes, however, that most of the circumstantial evidence pointing to Wagner’s guilt is questionable, despite leading the reader to the plausibility that he is responsible.

Shreve alternates the story between Jean’s existence on a small watercraft with her family and an unknown, mysterious woman who flirts with her husband, and Maren’s existence in a cramped house with her family and tenant. The storylines, feelings and emotions begin to blur and boil over in such a suspenseful manner, and we see that Jean can no longer separate herself emotionally from her investigation of the Smuttynose murders. As Jean discovers more and more about Maren’s life, she begins to question her own life, and what consequences might arise from taking certain matters into her own hands as the tension builds during a storm later during the boat trip.

Shreve has a way vividly describing the landscape and pulling you right into the scenes on the boat and in the freezing landscape of the Isle of Shoals. This was a fairly easy read that kept you guessing and wondering about what really happened, and the story had a shocking ending that makes this book worthy of its title.