Amagansett | Mark Mills | SUPER mystery!

Amagansett | Mark Mills | A great summer read

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Amagansett

	Amagansett Mark Mills, 2005 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A major debut novel that tells a mesmerizing story of love, death, and redemption in a small Long Island fishing community in 1947.

Amagansett is a novel as sweeping and haunting as the landscape of sky and sea it evokes. Beautifully and powerfully told, it announces the arrival of a gifted writer who skillfully weaves together a delicate love story, a brutal murder, an unforgettable evocation of a place and time, and characters shaped by the epic forces of nature, class, war, and memory.

Conrad Labarde is a first-generation Basque fisherman who casts his nets in the treacherous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Living alone among the high dunes on the east end of Long Island, he is kept company only by the ghosts of war. He is a working-class man in a region sharply divided between those who farm and fish this isolated finger of land year-round, and the wealthy, who claim it every summer for seaside escape.

But in postwar America, the landscape is changing quickly. And lives, too, will change dramatically when Conrad's nets pull in the body of a beautiful young woman, seaweed twined in her hair. Deputy Chief of Police Tom Hollis must traverse the shoals of class and community in order to determine if a crime has been committed and, if so, by whom. From the privileged family whose dead daughter was hiding a torturous secret, to the determined cop who seeks the truth, to the fisherman who is always one step ahead of him-they, and everyone else in Amagansett-will be touched by what the waves cast up that day.

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SUPER mystery!

Mark Mills did an outstanding job on this, his first novel. I have also read the Savage Garden and it is good, but doesn't hold a candle to this one! One of the best novels I've read in a long time. Memorable and satisfying! EXCELLENT!

A great summer read

So maybe it is because I finished this book on the beaches of Long Island that I was so pleased with it, but the fact remains that the author does an incredible job of painting the picture of Amagansett in the 40s. The character development and scenic descriptions are incredible. Once you get past the first 40-50 pages, you get most of the names straight and it is smooth sailing after that. A very good story, well told. A much better read than Atonement.

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Moody Mystery

Mark Mills' Amagansett features coastal long island as the setting in the post World War II era with a mixture of rich and poor characters that clash after a dead woman is pulled up in a fishing net. Conrad, the lead of the story, is a brooding veteran who serves as a powerful protagonist. The writing is fantastic, the mystery interesting, and this book is worth your time and money.

Lots of delicious fish, PLUS a mystery

On the surface, this is a fairly straightforward murder mystery -- the story of what happens after Long Island fisherman Conrad Lebarde nets a dead girl while fishing just offshore. The incident is investigated by Deputy Chief Tom Hollis of the local police who, having arrived in town only a year earlier, is somewhat of an outsider, identifying neither with the fisher/farmer locals nor the rich townies who have recently made the place their playground. That juxtaposition -- locals vs. rich interloper developers -- is really the heart of the novel, and the sense of entitlement among the rich characters plays in sharp relief to the (mostly) hardworking, honest labor values of the fisherman Mills paints so vividly. There are exceptions, of course -- stealing pearl earrings off a corpse doesn't get you high marks in my book no matter how much time and effort you spend fishing for a living.The main characters here are well developed and complex. Mills has obviously done his homework here. Lebarde and Hollis are the most developed. Lebarde is a WW2 veteran of Basque descent, recently home from fighting with the 505th Infantry Regiment in Italy and France (The war scenes are some of the most disterbing and visceral in the book. Terrible imagry, but well done.) Returnign to Amagansett after the war, he finds himself alone, his father having dies while he was away and his stepmother having decamped for California. Lebarde builds his house on the beach and begins fishing. Hollis, on the other hand, has avoided going to war by dint of his profession. Someone has to keep order at home while the battles rage, after all. After suffering a series of unfortunate events -- all of them caused in part by his action as and sheer nievete, though he is not wholly at fault -- he is put out to pasture in Amagansett, and goes willingly to avoid a scandal. Hollis gives the impression of beign someone who hopes for the best, yet can't seem to get it together enough to prepare for the worst only because he can't conceive of the worst actually happening.The major character, of course, is the land itself, and Mills does a fantastic job developing that character. The wind, the waves, the sand. . . the ice cold bite of the winter sea, the buried bones and lost pieces of Appalachian forest . . . it's all wonderfully and terribly part of the story.As for food, well, seafood is obviously front and cneter here. Much fish is consumed - dipped in batter and deep fired, roasted over a driftwood fire, clams and lobster tossed into a boiling pot. Really, just reading the book made me hungry, and had me wishing I lived closer to the shore. The single unappetising meal in the entire book was, of course, the dinner Lucy serves to Abel and Tom: Beef Tongue in Tomato Aspic served with Sweet Potato and Marshmallow Surprise. Yuck.. Still, there were some delicious sounding meals in there to counteract that disgusting mess. Those included: * Cherrystone clams * Lobster and caviar * clam chowder * Weakfish "Frigates"Weakfish are sea trout found only on the Northeastern coast of the US. They have a mild sweet, flaky flesh, good for broiling or baking. Lebarde eats them deep fried in beer batter, though, and that sounds delicious to me.

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Atmospheric Novel

In 1947 a young, rich woman is found in a fisherman's net. Her death is first considered accidental however, Tom Hollis a dective investigates further. Dectective Hollis and the fisherman Conrad who found the body are the maine charcters in the novel. The story is able convey what the eastern part of Long Island was like over 50 years ageo. Conrad is a sympathtic character and the story moves unfolds most of the time with a good pace. I liked it .B+ for crime genre.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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